Co-Chair: Rekha R Rao
Dr. Rekha Rao is a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories. She came to Sandia in 1990 after earning her BS from UC Berkeley and Ph.D. from the University of Washington, both in Chemical Engineering. Rekha is an expert in the computational mechanics of complex fluids. Rekha is the Vice-President of the USACM.
Co-Chair: Pania Newell
Pania Newell is an associate professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Utah. Her expertise lies at the interface of computational mechanics and material sciences, focusing on multi-physics and multi-scale processes in heterogeneous materials. She also co-hosts a podcast called ‘This Academic Life’
Former Chair: H Alicia Kim
Professor, Department of Structural Engineering; and Material Science and Engineering Program, UC San Diego. My research is in topology optimization, currently studying on coupled multidisciplinary and multiscale design problems for thermal-mechanics problems, nonlinear dynamics, electro-chemo-thermo-mechanics, and multiscale design problem.
Treasurer: Lucy Zhang
My name is Lucy T. Zhang. I am a Professor in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace & Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in Troy, NY, USA. My research is focused on developing numerical algorithms to study mechanics for coupled multiphysics and multiscale systems.
Awards & Visibility Officer: Anjali Sandip
Anjali Sandip is a Senior Lecturer in the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of North Dakota. Her research interests include numerical modeling, uncertainty quantification, physics-informed machine learning and parallel computing. Anjali’s PI-led research projects have received support from NSF, DOE, NASA, and NVIDIA. She has bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in mechanical engineering.
Mentoring & Diversity Officer: Azadeh Sheidaei
Dr. Azadeh Sheidaei is an Assistant Professor of Aerospace Engineering at Iowa State University, where she directs the Integrated Computational Material Design (ICMD) Laboratory. Dr. Sheidaei’s research expertise spans computational mechanics methods, data science, experimental approaches, and material processing for designing advanced material systems. Dr. Sheidaei’s research has been recognized with an NSF CAREER award for her work on printable multifunctional materials using a new physics-aware deep generative learning model.
Publicity Officer: Yue Yu
Yue Yu is a professor of Mathematics at Lehigh University, with affiliated positions at the College of Health and the Institute for Data, Intelligent Systems, and Computation (I-DISC) at Lehigh. She received her Ph.D. from Brown University in 2014, and was a postdoc fellow at Harvard University after graduation. Dr. Yu joined Lehigh University as an assistant professor of applied mathematics and was promoted to full professor in 2023. Her research lies in the area of applied mathematics and computational mechanics, with recent projects focusing on nonlocal problems and scientific machine learning. She has received an NSF Early Career award and an AFOSR Young Investigator Program (YIP) award.
Member at large: Carol Featherston
Professor Featherston is a chartered engineer and Fellow of the Institute of Mechanical Engineers and Royal Aeronautical Society with industrial experience at Airbus, ICI, and Rolls Royce. Her expertise is in the design and optimization of lightweight structures for the aerospace, automotive, and civil sectors. She leads several initiatives focused on sustainable transport and decarbonizing transport through electrification at Cardiff University. She is also the Honorary Secreatary of the Applied Mechanics Group of the Institute of Physics and an ambassador for the Aerospace Wales Forum.
Member at large: Varvara Kouznetsova
Varvara Kouznetsova is an Associate Professor in Multi-scale Mechanics of Solids at the Mechanical Engineering Department of the Eindhoven University of Technology in The Netherlands. Varvara Kouznetsova holds a degree in Applied Mathematics from Perm State Technical University, Russia, and a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Eindhoven University of Technology. Her research focus is on the development of multi-scale techniques applicable to various materials, ranging from high-strength steels to metamaterials, and related physical phenomena, emerging from non-trivial interactions across different space and time scales.
