Gregory Chirikjian, a professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, has received the American Society of Mechanical Engineers' 2019 Machine Design Award. Established in 1958, this award recognizes eminent achievement or distinguished service in the field of machine design, including application, research, development, or teaching of machine design. Chirikjian was recognized for introducing paradigms in the design of hyperredundant and binary-actuated mechanisms, modular self-reconfigurable robots, and spherical motors; and for mentoring generations of students and junior faculty in the areas of mechanisms and robotics.
Michael D. Shields, an assistant professor in the Department of Civil Engineering, has been selected by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science to receive a five-year grant under the agency's Early Career Research Program. Shields' research is focused on uncertainty quantification for wide-ranging problems in computational mechanics and computational materials science, with the goal of understanding the effects of uncertainties and random variations on the performance of materials and structures. His project, "Low-dimensional Manifold Learning for Uncertainty Quantification in Complex Multiscale Stochastic Systems," leverages large-scale dimension hyperreduction methods to enable uncertainty quantification for complex multiscale systems. This is Shields' third young investigator award; he is also the recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER Award and the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award.
Posted in News+Info
