This spring, Assistant Professor Krishna Garikipati traveled to Washington, D.C., where he attended a White House ceremony to accept the National Science Foundation's prestigious Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE).
Garikipati joined 56 other researchers from across the U.S. at the ceremony, presided over by John Marburger III, science advisor to the President and director of the White House Office of Science and Technology. Recipients were recognized for their "exceptional potential for leadership at the frontiers of knowledge," according to an NSF news release. PECASE is the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on early career scientists and engineers.
Garikipati was nominated for the award by the Department of Energy, an agency he'd worked with through Sandia National Laboratories since his arrival at U-M. His work is in the area of theoretical and computational aspects of nonlinear continuum mechanics and the deformation of solid bodies. For the past six years, Garikipati has been interested in problems in physics where mechanics are involved, particularly problems in semiconductors and microelectronic materials - mass transport, heat transport and certain electronic effects.
"They occur together and they influence each other," he said. "What happens is the physics gets a lot more complex. Many things are going on that before would have been considered separate phenomena, but they affect the material together."
For the past two years, he's been looking at similar problems in biology, in particular the process of tissue growth and damage. "Complex reactions take place by which mass is created and destroyed. All that happens to biological tissue is strongly influenced by mechanics.
"Ten years down the line, they'll aid surgeons in understanding how scar tissue will develop, how a burn is going to heal. The push here is to make this quantitative. It applies to wound healing, to the aging process, to sports and other injuries," he says of his work in modeling biological growth.
Garikipati has set out to model all these problems mathematically. His work under the PECASE award will allow him to further his research on the deformation of materials at scales of a micrometer and below, where traditional theories of continuous mechanics don't produce physically-accurate results. The mathematical models he's working toward will also have a predictive capability, something that's missing from current work.
Garikipati joined ME in 2000 after earning his master's degree and PhD from Stanford University, where he also conducted postdoctoral research in the Division of Mechanics and Computation. This year he also earned the Ruth and Joel Spira Outstanding Teaching Award from the University of Michigan's College of Engineering and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Fellowship.