Graduate School Newsblog

Tag: College of Engineering

Doctoral Finishing Fellowship – Fall 2023 Recipient – Benjamin Barrios Cerda

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First, I would like to extend my gratitude to the Graduate Dean Awards Advisory Panel for recommending me for this prestigious award. I also want to acknowledge the department of Civil, Environmental, and Geospatial Engineering for its support during my PhD studies. Most importantly, I thank my advisor Dr. Daisuke Minakata, who has guided me throughout my journey and equipped me with critical thinking skills. Without his unwavering commitment, understanding, and guidance, I would not have achieved the level of proficiency as a PhD student that I possess today.

I have been passionate about chemistry ever since I was in high school. Chemistry teaches you how matter transforms, and because matter is everything we are surrounded by, chemistry essentially helps you to understand the world. Many of the big problems our world faces can be tackled in some way from a chemical perspective. Energy, pollution, water scarcity, health, are some of the global issues that are actively being addressed with chemistry.

During my PhD, I have translated my chemistry background to the environmental engineering field by understanding how pollutants are transformed in natural and engineered water systems, such as lakes, rivers, or water treatment plants. My philosophy is that the molecular details of those chemical reactions have a profound influence on the rate of degradation and products distribution. This led me to publish papers where I show that we can use results from molecular simulations to explain phenomena at the bulk scale such as how fast reactions take place. Understanding these details will enable engineers to optimize operational parameters on the removal of contaminants, and will inform environmental policy makers about the fate of toxic compounds once released to bodies of water.

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Doctoral Finishing Fellowship – Fall 2023 Recipient – Hrishikesh Gosavi

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Since I began learning the basics of science, the effects of vibrations on environments has always fascinated me. As Nikola Tesla said, “If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.” It was with this aim that I started my Ph.D journey in Fall 2020.

My research has been in regards with “Metastructures”. These are unique structures which absorb vibrations in a system in particular frequency range, often called as ”bandgap”. It is because of this bandgap phenomenon that metastructures are widely used to mitigate vibration effects. Owing to large number of applications, it becomes important to estimate bandgaps in a metastructure to predict the frequency range in which the vibrations will be absorbed so that metastructures can be designed for various applications.

Through my research, I have aimed to developed new methods to estimate these bandgaps. The current methods available in the literature require a physics-based model of the metastructure (analytical model, finite/spectral element model) in order to estimate bandgaps. However, for various anisotropic materials, the material properties are difficult to quantify accurately which makes the physics-based model inaccurate. My research aims to overcome these limitations by developing methods which estimate bandgaps using purely experimental data. We have used the experimental data to study how a vibration wave is propagating through the metastructure (dispersion curve) and estimated bandgaps. Various other techniques such as substructuring, data-driven modeling algorithms were utilized. The developed techniques considerably reduced the design efforts required and made the entire design process much easier.

The funding provided by this fellowship will truly be helpful for me in putting all my energies in finishing my thesis in time and complete my Ph.D.!
I am grateful to the Graduate School for granting me this fellowship.
My advisor, Dr. Sriram Malladi has been more than helpful in guiding me through various ups and downs throughout my Ph.D journey. I am truly thankful for the relentless support he and his family has given me. Last but certainly not the least, I am thankful to my family i.e. my wife and my parents for their support in every aspect of my journey!

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Doctoral Finishing Fellowship – Fall 2023 Recipient – Mehnaz Tabassum

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Ever since my early days as an undergraduate student, I have been captivated by the potential of technology to revolutionize our daily lives. Michigan Technological University has provided an enriching environment for my research endeavors. The collaborative spirit among faculty members and the vibrant research community have fostered an environment for innovative ideas and cross-disciplinary collaborations. Engaging in stimulating discussions with brilliant minds and participating in cutting-edge projects have amplified my intellectual growth and fortified my passion for pushing the boundaries of knowledge in vehicular networking.

I am thrilled to share my remarkable journey as a doctoral candidate at Michigan Technological University. I started my PhD in Fall 2018 in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department. Throughout my doctoral journey, I have dedicated myself to unraveling the complexities of vehicular networking, exploring its intricacies one discovery at a time. By delving into areas such as intelligent transportation systems, vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication, and infrastructure-to-vehicle (I2V) interactions, I aim to contribute to the seamless integration of vehicles into our evolving smart cities.

I am immensely grateful for the support of my advisor, Dr. Aurenice Oliveira, whose guidance, expertise, and unwavering encouragement have been instrumental in shaping my research trajectory.

To all aspiring researchers and technologists, I urge you to embrace your passions and fearlessly pursue your dreams.

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Doctoral Finishing Fellowship – Fall 2023 Recipient – Ponkrshnan Thiagarajan

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Growing up in a township full of scientists and engineers, I have always been curious about how things work. This led me to pursue a bachelor’s in engineering from Nehru Institute of Engineering and Technology affiliated with Anna University, Chennai. I then pursued a master’s from the esteemed Indian Institute of Technology, Madras where I delved into diverse research projects that captivated my interest. Fueled by this newfound interest, I started my journey as a Ph.D. student eager to tackle intriguing and fundamental challenges within the field of engineering.

I started working on my Ph.D. in the Fall of 2019 at the Computational Mechanics and Machine Learning Lab led by Dr. Susanta Ghosh at Michigan Tech. The focus of my research is on understanding the uncertainties associated with the predictions of computational and machine-learning models. Any model, computational or data-driven, is a representation of a physical phenomenon. We develop such models to understand the world around us better. However, predictions of such models are not always reliable due to the uncertainties associated with them. These uncertainties could arise for various reasons such as natural variability in the systems we study, assumptions in developing these models, numerical approximations, lack of data, etc. In order to use these models in real-life scenarios, quantifying these uncertainties is crucial. My research involves developing novel techniques to quantify the uncertainties, use these uncertainties to improve the model’s performance, and explain the reasoning behind the uncertainties. In my first project, we developed a Bayesian neural network-based machine-learning model that can reliably classify breast histopathology images into benign and malignant images. In addition, the model can quantify uncertainties associated with the predictions. We further developed techniques to explain the uncertainties and use them to further improve the model’s performance. In my second project, we developed novel loss functions for Bayesian neural networks and showed their advantages over the state-of-the-art in image classification problems. I am currently working on quantifying uncertainties in computational models that are used to characterize material behavior and extending the first two projects for several other applications.

I would like to thank my advisor Dr. Susanta Ghosh for giving me the opportunity to carry out this exciting research as well as for his immense help and guidance throughout the process. I thank the Graduate Dean Awards Advisory Panel and the dean for recommending me for this award. It is an honor. I thank the graduate school and the Department of Mechanical Engineering-Engineering Mechanics for their constant support.

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Doctoral Finishing Fellowship – Fall 2023 Recipient – Hanrui Su

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In the fall of 2019, I embarked on my Ph.D. program in Environmental Engineering at MTU, working under the guidance of Dr. Yun Hang Hu. My research focus revolves around environmental pollution control technology, functional materials, and energy conversion systems. Throughout my doctoral journey, I have dedicated my efforts to developing an ultrafast alternative to the sluggish oxide ion transfers observed in conventional solid oxide fuel cells.
Our research endeavors led us to the discovery of a new type of fuel cell, known as a carbonate-superstructured solid fuel cell, which exhibits enhanced efficiency and performance by utilizing hydrocarbon fuel directly. This technology offers numerous advantages, including fuel flexibility, improved durability, and increased energy conversion efficiency at relatively lower operating temperatures. Presently, I am actively engaged in improving the fuel cell performance and exploring the underlying mechanisms. My goal is to contribute to the advancement of sustainable technologies that can shape a greener future and generate a positive impact on society.
I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the Graduate Dean Awards Advisory Panel for awarding me the finishing fellowship. This award will afford me the invaluable opportunity to dedicate my full attention to completing my dissertation and preparing for my defense. I am sincerely appreciating my advisor, Dr. Yun Hang Hu, whose invaluable guidance, conceptual insights, and technical expertise have been instrumental in shaping me into an independent researcher. I also extend my gratitude to my committee members, Dr. Miguel Levy, Dr. John Jaszczak, and Dr. Kazuya Tajiri, as well as my lab members, family, and friends, whose unwavering assistance and support have been integral to my success throughout my doctoral journey.

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Doctoral Finishing Fellowship – Summer 2023 Recipient – Roya Bagheri

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Growing up as a teenager, I always wanted to become a person who could help people around the world. I got the opportunity to start my academic life in health research, which brought me closer to what I have always wanted. As a mechanical engineer with a background in biomedical engineering and biomaterials, helping people and sharing the multidimensional point of view of these fields would be a fantastic opportunity to develop solutions for health-related problems worldwide.


I started my PhD in Mechanical Engineering in the Spring of 2020 at Michigan Technological University. Being part of the MTU family has been an exceptional experience for me. I am very fortunate to work in Dr. Abadi’s lab, who has guided me through research and several aspects of life. My research includes four different projects related to cardiovascular diseases and disorders (i.e., those related to the heart and blood vessels). Cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of mortality worldwide. Nanomaterials, with their unique morphologies and properties, have great potential for advancing cardiovascular engineering to treat diseases and disorders. My research is in three main categories, ranging from tissue engineering to robotics and medical devices.


Despite being far from my hometown, I feel at home in Michigan Tech. I have had several opportunities to participate in different organizations and competitions. This incredible journey will always hold a special place in my heart. I am so glad that I am close to my dream of obtaining a PhD and being able to help people around the world on a small scale in health.

I am grateful to the Graduate School for awarding me this doctoral finishing fellowship; this fellowship means a lot to me and motivates me to work harder to finish my PhD journey! I am thankful to the people who have supported me on my journey.

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Doctoral Finishing Fellowship – Summer 2023 Recipient – Evan Lucas

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I began my PhD journey in Fall 2019 in the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) department studying underwater acoustic communication systems. After taking a machine learning course, I decided I wanted to make machine learning and artificial intelligence a larger focus of my studies and ultimately joined a project focused on natural language processing (NLP) technologies for the summarization of dialogue.

My main dissertation chapters primarily focus on text summarization (how to concisely and accurately represent a large body of text with a small one) and segmentation (how to split up long chunks of dialogue into smaller ones). In my favorite chapter contained in the dissertation, I propose a text segmentation metric that goes beyond current segmentation metrics by scoring a segmentation set without requiring a human to provide a reference, which is currently required by all existing segmentation metrics. I continued this segmentation work by considering the case of fuzzy text segmentation, where the boundaries between segments are no longer solid and a sentence within a document can belong partly to multiple segments.

The papers on summarization are still in preparation, with one discussing a small model architecture modification to improve summarization quality and another exploring methods of demonstrating summarization model ownership by adding watermarks to generated content. As language models become more widely used, concerns about their use will continue to grow; one solution to this is to have ways of detecting or proving that the origin of text comes from a language model. In addition to these papers, I have also published on a technique for using limited human feedback in the form of a binary good/bad response to help improve model performance for classification models that contain more than two classes.

I would like to thank my advisor, Dr. Timothy Havens, for his support, encouragement, and guidance throughout my PhD. The last two years of my work would also not have been possible without the support of Bob Friday and Paul Fulton from Visionyze; they have funded my research up until this point and collaborated with me on several projects. I’d also like to thank my committee and the ECE department for their support along the way. Finally, I am incredibly grateful to the Graduate School as well as the Graduate School Awards Advisory Panel for awarding me this fellowship, which will help me complete my dissertation and finish publishing the last papers of my PhD.

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Doctoral Finishing Fellowship – Spring 2023 Recipient – Sid Gopujkar

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I started working at the APS LABS for my Masters’ thesis in Fall 2017. The research and the people at the APS are so amazing, that it wasn’t a difficult decision to stay for my PhD. I started my PhD in Summer 2018 under the guidance of Dr. Jeremy Worm, who is the associate director of APS LABS.

Majority of my PhD work has been on gasoline engines- how they can be further improved and made more efficient. The projects I have worked on have been industrial projects for major automotive companies like General Motors, Ford, Stellantis and Nostrum Energy. The current automotive climate is all about electrification. But I believe that the internal combustion engine, which is one of the major factors that has brought civilization to the advanced stage it is at right now, still has a massive role to play in the future. But the beauty of working at the APS LABS is that you are not confined to a single subject, and get exposure to all sorts of power systems. In the last five years, I have worked with hybrid electric vehicles as well, and also on a project to consider the environmental and economic impacts of electrifying the Mackinac Island ferry.

The last five years have been memorable and fulfilling, and a lot of that is thanks to my advisor, Dr. Jeremy Worm. With the help of the Finishing Fellowship, I will be able to write the final chapter of doctoral journey (figuratively and literally), and move a step closer to my goal of becoming an academic.

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Doctoral Finishing Fellowship – Spring 2023 Recipient – Nikhil Mittal

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My passion for research developed early on in my life as I saw my father going to the laboratory, doing research using cool equipment. He inspired me to ask intriguing questions in life and find answers to them. My journey in biomedical research began during my undergraduate in biotechnology where I was introduced to the concepts of cell and molecular biology research and its application. In my undergrad, I got firsthand experience of working in a research lab where I learned to independently run PCR (polymerase chain reaction) and electrophoresis gels. This sparked my curiosity to further develop my career in research. That’s when I joined Michigan Tech as a master’s student in the biomedical engineering department. At Michigan Tech, I learned about the development of biomaterials and their physiological applications. During this time, I also got the opportunity to do an internship at a Biotech company.

My research experience during my master’s and internship motivated me in advancing my professional career and join PhD. In 2018, I got the opportunity to join Dr. Sangyoon Han’s Mechanobiology laboratory. My research focus is to understand the mechanism of how cells sense the stiffness of their surrounding environment. Specifically, I am investigating how and when exactly the mechanical link between a cell and its extracellular matrix (ECM), known as focal adhesions, sense different stiffness and molecules involved in the process. For this purpose, I use soft elastic gels (biomaterials), live-cell imaging microscopy, and machine learning-based image analysis to study how different ECM stiffness can affect the force transfer through these connections. Mechanical stiffness of the matrix has been known to dictate cell behavior such as their survival, proliferation, migration, altered drug response and even tumor progression. With my research, I aim to provide new insights in physiology and pathophysiology for developmental disorders, cancer progression and metastasis and designs of tissue transplantation. This is critical in determining treatment strategies for these diseases. Along with research, I was fortunate to mentor and supervise many undergraduate and masters’ students for their respective projects. I also got the opportunity to present my work at different conferences and win grants for my research.

I am grateful to my advisor Dr. Sangyoon J. Han for his continued support and guidance over my PhD years at Michigan Tech. I am also grateful to my committee and biomedical engineering department for supporting me with my PhD journey. I am thankful to the Graduate school and Graduate Dean Awards Advisory Panel for granting me this fellowship. This fellowship will help me dedicate all of my time to complete my dissertation.

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