From cutting-edge robotics, design and bioengineering to sustainable energy solutions, ocean engineering, nanotechnology and innovative materials science, MechE students and their advisors are doing incredibly innovative work. The graduate students featured here represent a snapshot of the great work in progress this spring across the Department of Mechanical Engineering and demonstrate how the future of this field is as limitless as the imagination of its professionals.
democratizing design through ai
rainy weather in Lyle
Hometown: Champaign, Illinois
Advisor: Assistant Professor Faez Ahmed
Interests: Food, climbing, skiing, soccer, tennis, cooking.
Lyle Regenwetter finds excitement in the prospect of generative ai “democratizing” design and allowing inexperienced designers to tackle complex design problems. His research explores new training methods by which generative ai models can be taught to implicitly obey design constraints and synthesize higher-performing designs. Knowing that future designers often have a deep understanding of user needs but may lack the technical training to create solutions, Regenwetter also develops human-ai collaboration tools that allow ai models to interact and support designers in popular CAD software and real design. issues.
Solving a big problem
Loicka Baille
Hometown: L'Escale, France
Advisor: Daniel Zitterbart
Interests: Being outdoors: diving, caving or climbing. Sailing the Charles River, martial arts classes and playing volleyball.
Loïcka Baille's research focuses on the development of remote sensing technologies to study and protect marine life. Her main project revolves around improving onboard whale detection technology to prevent vessel strikes, with special attention to protecting North Atlantic right whales. Baille is also involved in an ongoing study of emperor penguins. Her team visits Antarctica annually to tag penguins and collect data to improve their understanding of penguin population dynamics and draw conclusions about the overall health of the ecosystem.
Water, water anywhere
Carlos Diaz-Marin
Hometown: San Jose, Costa Rica
Advisor: Professor Gang Chen | Former advisor: Professor Evelyn Wang
Interests: Hiking, biking, and dancing in New England
Carlos Díaz-Marín designs and synthesizes inexpensive salt polymer materials that can capture large amounts of moisture from the air. His goal is to change the way we generate drinking water from the air, even in arid conditions. In addition to water generation, these salt polymer materials can also be used as thermal batteries, capable of storing and reusing heat. Beyond scientific applications, Díaz-Marín is excited to continue conducting research that can have great social impacts and that finds and explains new physical phenomena. As a LatinX person, Díaz-Marín is also motivated to help increase diversity in STEM.
Scalable manufacturing of nano-architectured materials.
Somayajulu Dhulipala
Hometown: Hyderabad, India
Advisor: Assistant Professor Carlos Portela
Interests: Space exploration, taekwondo, meditation.
Somayajulu Dhulipala works on developing lightweight materials with tunable mechanical properties. He is currently working on methods for the scalable fabrication of nanoarchitectured materials and the prediction of their mechanical properties. The ability to tune the mechanical properties of specific materials brings versatility and adaptability, making these materials suitable for a wide range of applications across multiple industries. While the applications of the research are quite diverse, Dhulipala is passionate about making space habitable for humanity, a crucial step in becoming a spacefaring civilization.
Ingestible health devices
Jimmy McRae
Hometown: Woburn, Massachusetts
Advisor: Associate Professor Giovani Traverso
Interests: Anything basketball related: playing, watching, attending games, organizing local tournaments.
Jimmy McRae aims to dramatically improve diagnostic and therapeutic capabilities through non-invasive healthcare technologies. His research focuses on leveraging materials, mechanics, embedded systems, and microfabrication to develop novel ingestible electronic and mechatronic devices. This ranges from ingestible electroceutical capsules that modulate hormones that regulate hunger to devices capable of ultra-long continuous monitoring and actuations that can be activated remotely from inside the stomach. The principles guiding McRae's work to develop devices that work in extreme environments can be applied far beyond the gastrointestinal tract, with applications to outer space, the ocean, and beyond.
Freestyle BMX meets machine learning
Eva Nates
Hometown: Narberth, Pennsylvania
Advisor: Professor Peko Hosoi
Interests: Rowing, running, cycling, hiking, baking
Eva Nates is working with the Australian cycling team to create a tool to rank Bicycle Motocross Freestyle (BMX FS) tricks. She uses a singular value decomposition method to perform a principal component analysis of the time-dependent point tracking data of an athlete and their bike during a race to classify each trick. The 2024 Olympic team hopes to incorporate this tool into their training workflow, and Nates worked alongside the team at their facility on Australia's Gold Coast during MIT's Independent Activities Period in January.
Augmentation of astronauts with wearable limbs
Erik Ballesteros
Hometown: Spring, Texas
Advisor: Professor Harry Asada
Interests: Cosplay, Star Wars, Lego Bricks
Erik Ballesteros' research seeks to support astronauts who are performing planetary extravehicular activities through the use of supernumerary robotic limbs (SuperLimbs). His job is designed to design and control the demonstration to assist astronauts with post-fall recovery, quadrupedal locomotion of the human leader/robot follower, and coordinated manipulation between the SuperLimbs and the astronaut to perform tasks such as excavation. and sample handling.
This article appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of the Department of Mechanical Engineering magazine. MechE connects.
