The ME department is pleased to welcome our new faculty members Solomon Adera, Ashley Bucsek, Heather Cooper, Jon Estrada, and Nima Fazeli to the team.
Solomon Adera – Assistant Professor
Adera obtained his Ph. D. in Mechanical Engineering from MIT and has worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. His research interests include fundamental studies of heat and mass transfer, fluid-structure interactions and water-energy nexus.
Ashley Bucsek – Assistant Professor
Bucsek earned her a master’s and PhD in mechanical engineering from the Colorado School of Mines and her bachelor in mechanical engineering from the University of Wyoming. She will be joining us an assistant professor and her research interest includes mechanical behavior of materials, micromechanical modeling, in situ/in operando 3D X-ray microscopy, energy conversion, among other topics.
Heather Cooper – LEO Lecturer
Cooper is our newest LEO Lecturer for ME and will be heading up our ME 450 classes. Prior to her current position at the U-M, Cooper worked for General Motors and the SME Education Foundation.
Jon Estrada – Assistant Professor
Estrada graduated from Brown University with a master’s and PhD in solid mechanics and received a bachelors from MIT in material science and engineering. He came to U-M ME as a post-doc and now continues his journey as an assistant professor. His research interests include experimental mechanics of soft and bio-materials, material characterization including high-speed rheometry, magnetic resonance, and inverse techniques, inertial cavitation dynamics, photoacoustic and laser microscopy, cell mechanics, image processing techniques, digital image and volume correlation.
Nima Fazeli – Assistant Professor
Fazeli is joining us as an assistant professor with research interests in robotic Manipulation, inference and state-estimation, physics-based learning and semantic AI, controls for hybrid systems, and contact modeling for robots interactions. He joins us from MIT where he received his PhD, prior to MIT he attended the University of Maryland at College Park and received his master’s.