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Profiles
UH•News
Faculty Focus By Francine Parker
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ashashree Kulkarni’s love for teaching dates to her childhood years spent in India, where she lived with her parents on the campus of the nation’s oldest engineering college — the Indian Institute of Technology (ITT), Roorkee. Her mother and father are both professors, and her father has been teaching at the institute for more than 30 years. They often opened their home to “faculty members who would stop by and students who would visit,” recalls Kulkarni, the Bill D. Cook Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Houston Cullen College of Engineering. Being surrounded by young engineering students left quite an impression on Kulkarni while growing up. She also witnessed the different aspects of teaching whether it was watching her father prepare lectures for his classes or her mother spending hours grading papers. That glimpse of academic life influenced Kulkarni, motivating her to follow in her parents’ footsteps. “By the time I entered college, I realized I was interested in both teaching and research in engineering, so I wanted to be a professor,” Kulkarni said. In 1997, Kulkarni left her hometown and enrolled in the ITT, Bombay after she was selected from a pool of more than 100,000 students who took the country’s annual ITT Joint Entrance Examination. The exam was the sole admission test for the various Indian Institutes of Technology and Indian School of Mines. She was one of 20 women in a class of 400
Yashashree Kulkarni, Bill D. Cook Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering
engineering students. All of her engineering professors were men. Initially, campus life was challenging for Kulkarni because “I had attended an all-girls school from kindergarten through high school,” she said. Kulkarni adjusted to her new environment quickly, and in 2001, she graduated with her bachelor’s degree in civil engineering and was awarded the Institute Silver Medal as the outstanding civil engineering student. She went on to earn her doctorate in applied mechanics from California Institute of Technology in 2006 and completed her postdoctoral research at the University of California-San Diego in 2009. Shortly afterward, Kulkarni joined UH as an assistant professor in the mechanical engineering
department. Since then, she has immersed herself in academic life, conducting research, developing a new course on computational modeling of materials and advising both undergraduate and graduate students. She recently organized the 2013 Pan-American Congress of Applied Mechanics, an international conference attended by more than 100 participants. Kulkarni’s teaching skills and research, which focuses on computational mechanics and material science, have earned her praise and recognition. Last year, she was presented with the college’s outstanding teacher award and was promoted to the Bill D. Cook assistant professorship, a faculty scholar position. She also has received the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects (DARPA) Agency Young Faculty Award. The DARPA award is given to rising research stars in junior faculty positions at U.S. academic institutions. When she isn’t teaching, conducting research or counseling students, Kulkarni takes singing lessons in classical Indian music. The hobby isn’t new for her. Her training began when she was a young girl in India, and throughout the years, Kulkarni has displayed her musical talents. She frequently performed during her undergraduate and graduate school days and in Houston with her instructor. Nowadays, Kulkarni enjoys a quiet life both on campus and at home with her 18-month-old son and husband, Ashutosh Agrawal, who also teaches at UH. Agrawal is an assistant professor of mechanical engineering. “I am very happy to be here at UH,” she said. “It’s an exciting time to be in the department and at the University.”
Photo: Jessie Villareal
Kulkarni Engineers a Successful Career
COUGARS AT WORK By Kristina Michel
hris Kuether has been tinkering with tools since he was a child, so tinkering with research instruments as a research designer in the University of Houston College of Optometry is second nature to him. Kuether modifies or re-designs the equipment available at the college to work for the researchers if what they need for their projects is too expensive to purchase or can’t be found on the market. Each project is different. It can be as simple as modifying a diagnostic instrument to measure a different angle of the eyeball. Other times, the project is a little more complicated, such as when Kuether was tasked with designing a modified version of a $19,000 clinical device to work with a computer-driven motor on a budget of less than $1,000. “My job, mostly, is to figure out what the researchers want to do and what instruments they need,” Kuether said. Kuether began his career as a research assistant in the Indiana University School of Optometry in Bloomington. From there, he was recruited to the UH College of Optometry in 1969 when the graduate research program was in its infancy. He later worked at Baylor College of Medicine for a few years, but he returned to UH in 1984. Kuether says his favorite part of his job is that it’s never the same. “Every day is brand new with a brand new challenge,” Kuether said. When he’s not working at UH, Kuether spends his time playing the contrabass in the Houston Civic Symphony and the horn in a brass quintet. Music has always been Kuether’s passion. His bachelor’s degree is in music. He met his wife, a cellist in the Texas Medical Center Orchestra, when they were playing together in the Houston Civic Symphony.
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Photo: Thomas Campbell
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