Contributors
Kevin Alexander is vice president and western regional manager at Hazen and Sawyer. His research focuses on the planning, design, and construction of water, wastewater, and water reclamation facilities. He applies advanced treatment technology for high water recovery applications including reverse osmosis and other membrane and nonmembrane-based technologies.
Lars Blackmore is the principal rocket landing engineer at SpaceX, where he focuses on precision landing for space vehicles. Most recently, his team designed the algorithms and operations for the SpaceX Falcon 9 Reusable rocket. Previously he worked on precision Mars landing and autonomous air and sea vehicles. He specializes in using convex optimization to solve previously intractable onboard guidance and control problems.
Robert Braun is dean of engineering and applied science at the University of Colorado Boulder. His research has focused on planetary entry systems, Mars landing systems design, the Mars Sample Return Project, and multidisciplinary optimization.
Julie Champion is an associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research is on design and fabrication of therapeutic biomaterials self-assembled from engineered proteins for applications in vaccines and in treating cancer and inflammation. Her group seeks to understand and control the interactions between these materials and cells or proteins through manipulation of molecular and physical biomaterial properties.
Amy Childress is professor and director of the environmental engineering program at the University of Southern California. Her research interests center on membrane contactor processes for innovative solutions to water treatment challenges, pressure-driven membrane processes as industry standards for desalination and water reuse, membrane bioreactor technology, colloidal and interfacial aspects of membrane processes, and salinity gradient energy production.
Jennifer Cochran is an associate professor of bioengineering at Stanford University, where she develops and uses new technology to engineer proteins for biotechnology and medical applications. Current interests include engineered biomolecules for use as diagnostic agents, cancer therapeutics, materials for tissue regeneration, and research tools for probing complex biological systems at the molecular scale.
Kayvon Fatahalian is an assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, where he researches the design of high-performance systems for real-time rendering and the analysis and mining of visual data at scale.
Kristen Grauman is an associate professor of computer science at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research in computer vision and machine learning focuses on visual search and recognition. Current interests include egocentric vision, language and vision, interactive segmentation, activity recognition, and video summarization.
Warren Hunt is a research scientist at Oculus Research, where he works on graphics, particularly image syntheses and display interface for virtual reality devices.
Darrell Irvine is a professor of materials science and engineering and biological engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research focuses on the application of engineering tools to problems in cellular immunology, the development of new materials for vaccine and drug delivery, and vaccine development for HIV and immunotherapy of cancer.
DeShawn Jackson is a production enhancement business analyst at Halliburton. Her research interests include production enhancement and subsurface insight utilizing fracture mapping and reservoir monitoring services such as microseismic monitoring, surface and downhole microdeformation analysis, distributed temperature and acoustic sensing with fiber optic monitoring, and integrated far-field and near-wellbore sensors.
Sangbae Kim is an associate professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he focuses on bioinspired robotics, biomechanics of locomotion, and printable robots.
Brian Kirby is an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Cornell University. His research is on microfluidics devices for biochemical analysis with applications to counterbioterrorism, environmental monitoring, medical devices, and biology. His scientific expertise includes coupling of chemistry, fluid mechanics, and electrodynamics in micro- and nanofabricated systems as well as tissue-engineered scaffolds.
Manish Kumar is an assistant professor of chemical engineering at Pennsylvania State University. His group develops materials that combine the exquisite specificity and functionality of biological molecules with the physical toughness and engineering ability of polymers. Their favorite system is combining water channel proteins (aquaporins) with block copolymers to develop next-generation desalination membranes. The group also works on innovative ideas to improve the sustainability of conventional desalination membranes.
David Lentink is an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Stanford University, where he studies biological flight as an inspiration for engineering design. His comparative biological flight research ranges from maple seeds and insects to birds such as swifts, lovebirds, and hummingbirds. His group applies mechanical research of dynamically morphing wings, vortex dynamics, and fluid-structure interaction to robot designs that fly in complex environments in realistic atmospheric conditions.
David Luebke is vice president of research at NVIDIA, where he focuses on a variety of computer graphics research topics, especially virtual and augmented reality, real-time rendering, ray tracing, display technology, and GPU computing.
Baoxia Mi is an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research interests include membrane separation, transport, and interfacial phenomena; physicochemical processes; drinking water purification and wastewater reuse; desalination; environmental nanotechnology; and innovative applications of membrane technology for renewable energy generation, public health protection, and hygiene and sanitation improvement for underdeveloped and disaster-ridden regions.
John Orcutt is a distinguished professor of geophysics at the Cecil H. and Ida M. Green Institute for Geophysics and Planetary Physics at Scripps Institution of
Oceanography, University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and a member of the executive committee and distinguished scholar at the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UCSD. His major areas of research are marine seismology applied to both crustal and mantle structure, particularly seismic tomography; long-term ocean observations and wireless networking related to observations; theoretical seismology; and applications of seismology to monitoring of nuclear tests.
John Owens is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Davis. His research focuses on commodity parallel computing/GPU computing with a concentration in fundamental GPU parallel primitives (data structures and algorithms), interactive and offline computer graphics and high-performance computing applications, and multi-GPU computing. He has a recent interest in programmability of GPUs and GPUs in data centers.
Derek Paley is the Willis H. Young Jr. Associate Professor of Aerospace Engineering Education at the University of Maryland, where he conducts research in dynamics and control, including cooperative control of autonomous vehicles, adaptive sampling with mobile networks, and spatial modeling of biological groups.
Marco Pavone is an assistant professor of aeronautics and astronautics at Stanford University. His research interests are in the development of methodologies for the analysis, design, and control of autonomous systems, with an emphasis on robotic networks, autonomous aerospace vehicles, and mobility platforms for extreme planetary environments.
Cynthia Reinhart-King is an associate professor of biomedical engineering at Cornell University, where she focuses on understanding the mechanisms that drive tissue formation and tissue disruption during diseases such as atherosclerosis and cancer. Specifically, her team employs multidisciplinary methodologies involving principles from cell biology, biophysics, biomaterials, and biomechanics to study how physical and chemical cues within the extracellular environment drive fundamental cellular processes including cell-matrix adhesion, cell-cell adhesion, and cell migration.
Abhishek Roy is a senior research scientist in energy and water solutions at The Dow Chemical Company, where he uses the principles of fundamental science to create solutions for sustainable water management. His research centers on reverse osmosis technology, polymer synthesis and transport modeling of proton exchange membranes, high-temperature liquid chromatography, polyolefins, and industrial coatings.
Christopher Stafford is a materials science and engineering research chemist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. His research is on advanced measurements of thin-film composite membranes, namely the active layer that is extremely thin and fragile, using measurements that include x-ray and neutron scattering, vibrational spectroscopy, and surface analysis.
Peter Tessier is the Richard Baruch M.D. Career Development Associate Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His research is on designing and optimizing a class of large therapeutic proteins (antibodies) that holds great potential for detecting and treating human disorders ranging from cancer to Alzheimer’s disease. His team designs antibodies with high binding affinity and solubility through key fundamental breakthroughs.
Gordon Wetzstein is an assistant professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University, where his group focuses on advancing imaging, microscopy, and display systems. His research at the intersection of computer graphics, machine vision, optics, scientific computing, and perception has a wide range of applications in next-generation consumer electronics, scientific imaging, human-computer interaction, and remote sensing.
