Winning U
CF broke its own record Award Sleppy, recipients Shanice Jones, ‘18 for for the most number of National Science Foundation CAREER Christine ‘18 this year. The university leads the state and ranks sixth in the nation for boasting 12 award winners, three of whom are mechanical and aerospace engineering faculty members. Assistant professors Ranajay Ghosh, Helen Huang and Andrew Dickerson were selected for this year’s award, and Huang even broke a record of her own — she is the first faculty member at UCF to receive an NSF CAREER Award and an RO1 grant from the National Institutes of Health. “I’m so proud of our faculty members. These awards are only the tip of the iceberg and they demonstrate the stellar competency of our faculty as a whole,” said Yoav Peles, the chair of the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. “This is just the beginning and I’m sure that there are many more to come.”
Winning “Structure-Property on the Outside: The Extreme Mechanics of Tunable Exoskeleton Structures”
“Leveraging Electroencephalography (EEG) Artifacts for Multimodal Neuromechanics”
Ghosh aims to discover and quantify the origins of extreme mechanical behavior of tunable exoskeletal systems, which would address many of the challenges of soft autonomous systems. Through his research, Ghosh intends to discover a central consequence of structure-property relationships, that of a building-block paradigm.
Huang aims to establish that EEG alone can be used for multimodal neuromechanics, which would eliminate the need for integrating multiple systems with EEG. With the award, she will also establish an outreach program, Neuromechanics^Girls, to support and encourage young girls who are interested in STEM.
To learn more about Ghosh’s research, visit mae.ucf.edu/COSMOS. 12 | MOMENTUM Fall 2020
To learn more about Huang’s research, visit mae.ucf.edu/BRAIN.
“Tuning Liquid Jet and Splash Dynamics By Deformable and Heterogenous Boundaries” Science has yet to physically model complex flow phenomena of liquid jet and splash dynamics in surfacetension dominated flows, but Dickerson intends to do just that. His work will lead to the creation of new methods of fluid dispersal, and could even empower the next generation of airborne drug delivery systems and shift the paradigm in splash control. To learn more about Dickerson’s research, visit dickersonlab.com.
