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MEAM Seminar: “The Role of YAP and TAZ in Regulating Mechanical Load-induced Bone Adaptation and Osteocytes Mechanosensing”

Room 337, Towne Building 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

Fetal movements and physical activities generate mechanical signals that regulate musculoskeletal development. It is widely accepted that a bone’s adaptive response occurs within an optimal strain range that stimulates bone formation, exceeding typical daily activity levels. This principle has led to models predicting how bones respond to mechanical loads, as insufficient mechanical signals can result […]

MSE Ph.D. Thesis: “Metasurfaces For Environmental Refractive Index Sensing: Design, Fabrication And Interrogation”

Towne 327 the Active Learning Classroom

Metasurfaces are artificial materials composed of sub-wavelength building blocks whose size, shape, periodicity and composition are tailored to engineer their optical response and achieve arbitrary control of their interactions with light. Their phase discontinuities or resonances are critically dependent upon the local dielectric or refractive index environment, thus making metasurfaces excellent candidates as refractive index […]

MEAM Seminar: “SLAM in Hard Places”

Room 337, Towne Building 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping is a fundamental problem for robots interacting with a novel environment and has been a densely studied area of research for several decades. The modern paradigm of feature extraction and matching coupled with advancements in sensor technology have allowed robots to achieve sub meter localization accuracy over kilometer long trajectories in […]

MEAM Seminar: “Discrete and Continuous Modeling of Fibrous Biological Materials: Compressible Large Deformations, Damage, and Crack Propagation”

Room 337, Towne Building 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

Random fiber networks are integral to biological materials such as the extracellular matrix, cytoskeleton, and blood clots. A random fiber network is the main structural component of the extracellular matrix, the cytoskeleton, and our blood clots. The mechanical behavior of these materials is characterized by large deformations, non-linear stress-strain response, and large compressibility. Experimental and […]

MEAM Seminar: “Mechanical Interfaces for Health: From Mechanobiology to Tactile Perception”

Room 337, Towne Building 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

Our lab combines adhesion and tribology with modern polymers and surface coatings to understand soft interfaces in biology towards improving human health and accessibility. On the scale of cells, mechanical stiffness of cells and tissue can indicate diseases like fibrosis or osteoarthritis. On the scale of the human body, mechanical forces generated by friction form […]

MEAM Ph.D. Thesis Defense: “Elastomeric Strain Limitation for Design of Soft Pneumatic Actuators”

Room 337, Towne Building 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

Modern robots embody power and precision control, yet as robots undertake tasks that apply forces on humans this power brings risk of injury. Soft robotic actuators use deformation to produce smooth, continuous motions and conform to delicate objects while imparting forces capable of safely pushing humans. This thesis presents strategies for the design, modeling, and […]

MEAM Ph.D. Thesis Defense: “Mechanical Robust Biocompatible Polymeric Networks for Repetitive Loading”

Towne 319 220 S. 33rd Street, Philadelphia, United States

Crosslinked biocompatible polymer networks offer unique potential for biomedical applications that demand high resilience under repetitive load-bearing conditions. However, conventional hydrogels often exhibit poor mechanical strength and irreversible damage under cyclic deformation. To address these challenges, this work presents a class of engineered polymer network designed for enhanced mechanical robustness: cryogel-based double-network (DN) hydrogels. In […]

MEAM Seminar: “Modularity Strategies for Pneumatic Control in Soft Robotic Systems”

Room 337, Towne Building 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

Soft robotic systems, defined as both compliant robotic platforms and mechanically adaptive structures, offer unique advantages such as safe human-machine interaction, structural flexibility, and environment-driven reconfigurability. By relying on deformable materials and embedded physical intelligence, these systems can achieve complex motions and responsive behaviors that are difficult for conventional rigid robots. Pneumatic control, including actuation, […]

MEAM Ph.D. Thesis: “Geometric Methods for Efficient and Explainable Control of Underactuated Robotic Systems”

Raisler Lounge (Room 225), Towne Building 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

Robots are complex, high-dimensional systems, governed by nonlinear, underactuated dynamics and evolving on non-Euclidean manifolds, posing numerous challenges for control synthesis and analysis. While optimization-based methods of control can flexibly accommodate diverse dynamics, costs, and constraints, they often demand coarse approximations or powerful onboard processors (infeasible for many aerial and space systems) due to their […]

MEAM Seminar: “Exploring Jet-Propelled Soft Robots: Design, Experiments, and Theory”

Room 337, Towne Building 220 South 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

Understanding how marine animals migrate is critical for assessing the impacts of climate change on ocean ecosystems—and yet current Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs), with their noisy propellers and rigid hulls, are ill-suited to operate alongside sensitive species. Bio-inspired robots offer a promising alternative by emulating the natural locomotion strategies of fish, cephalopods, and other marine […]