Jeff Sakamoto (left), Ramanarayan Vasudevan (right)
The ME department is pleased to welcome Jeff Sakamoto and Ramanarayan Vasudevan who will both be joining the faculty as associate professor and assistant professor, respectively.
Sakamoto earned his PhD from UCLA and is currently a tenured associate professor at Michigan State University. An engineer with a strong interest in synthesis, processing and functionalization of ceramics and hydrogel, his research is highly interdisciplinary guided by the fields of energy storage/conversion and biomedicine. Sakamoto has established independent and substantial research programs investigating superionic conducting ceramic electrolytes, solid electrolyte-electrode interfaces and highly-ordered and hierarchical battery electrode architectures. Throughout his career, Sakamoto has demonstrated his ability to conduct cutting-edge research publishing 51 peer-reviewed manuscripts and four book chapters and serving as a contributor to 13 patents.
Vasudevan received his PhD from UC Berkeley and is currently working as a postdoctoral associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research focuses on the development of optimization, robotics, and biomechanical modeling theory that takes advantage of data from cheap, ubiquitous sensing technologies to automate diagnostic and rehabilitative tasks. A primary application of Vasudevan’s work has been the identification and analysis of dynamical models of human movement to construct personalized control strategies that can be used by robotic platforms to reduce the likelihood of falling. He will be collaborating with colleagues in the College of Engineering and the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute on connected and autonomous vehicles research.
