The ME department is pleased to welcome Jesse Capecelatro, Daniel Cooper, Yue Fan, and Bogdan Ioan Popa, who are joining the faculty as assistant professors.
Jesse Capecelatro
Capecelatro earned his PhD from Cornell University and has worked as a research scientist at the Center for Exascale Simulation of Plasma-coupled Combustion (XPACC) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His research endeavors include collaboration with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory on numerical modeling of fluidized bed reactors as well as high performance computing of turbulent multiphase flows and fundamental and numerical studies of particle-induced turbulence.
Daniel Cooper
Cooper earned his PhD from the University of Cambridge and has worked as a postdoctoral scholar in the Laboratory for Manufacturing Productivity at MIT. His research interests lie in making impactful contributions to the area of manufacturing and sustainability and his PhD work focused on material efficiency in the steel and aluminum industries, including the reuse of manufacturing scrap, extending the lifespan of products, and the potential to reuse components at product end-of-life.
Yue Fan
Fan earned his PhD from MIT and is currently working as a Staff Scientist for the Materials Science and Technology Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Fan’s primary research interest is to provide a substantive knowledge on the mechanics and microstructural evolution in complex materials systems under extreme environments via predictive modeling, and thus facilitate the development of new science-based high performance materials with novel functions and unprecedented strength, durability and resistance to traditional degradation and failure.
Bogdan Ioan Popa
Popa earned his PhD from the Politech University of Bucharest. He went on to work as a Postdoctoral Research Associate and Research Scientist at Duke University with his research focusing on complex artificial materials designed to control and manipulate the propagation of several types of physical waves, including electromagnetic and acoustic waves. Some of his most recent research is to embed electronic components into the fabric of materials in order to obtain a new generation of smart materials.