Graduate Research

I am currently a fourth year Ph.D. student in Dr. Mark Rentschler’s Advanced Medical Technologies Laboratory. My current research consists primarily of developing a large deformation, thermo-poromechanics finite element model to simulate the heat transport, water transport and deformation of biological tissue when acted upon by outside forces. Currently, my...

Carlye Lauff, a mechanical engineering PhD student studying design, is taking her research to the land of kangaroos and...

Madalyn is a senior PhD student and works with Dr. Mark Rentschler in the Advanced Medical Technologies Laboratory (AMTL). Her work has been focused on characterizing adhesion between a micro-patterned substrate and a soft synthetic biological tissue. While the direct application for her work is in optimizing the mobility of...

Ricardo’s primary research interests are low-cost air quality monitoring, cookstove adoption, and pollution exposure assessment and modeling. His dissertation research is part of REACCTING, a project in Northern Ghana performing personal, microenvironmental, and regional air quality measurements as part of a cookstove intervention study. He is currently working on developing...

Xin Qian Focus Area: Heat and Phonon Transport - Ronggui Yang Lab Xin is a third-year PhD student working with Professor Ronggui Yang. His work focuses on modeling and characterizing thermal transport properties in novel materials with promising applications in solar cells and light emitting diodes and batteries to address...

Zhengwei Li is a senior PhD student working with Professor Jianliang Xiao. Li's work spans a few different areas, including mechanics of stretchable electronics and optoelectronics, mechanics of soft materials, stretchable thin film, optical functional materials and nanomaterials. He is now studying hierarchical wrinkling of thin films on both flat...

Focus Area: Soft Materials - Keplinger Group Tim is a third year PhD student studying with Professor Christoph Keplinger. Prior to joining the Department of Mechanical Engineering at CU Boulder, Tim received a BS in ceramic engineering and worked at Oak Ridge National Laboratory studying ceramic properties and processing. He...

Focus Area: Materials Science and Engineering Shanshan is in her third year of graduate school, working with Professors Y.C. Lee and Ronggui Yang in the field of thermal management of mobile electronics. She has made the thinnest thermal ground planes with 3.5 times effective thermal conductivity than that that of...

Focus Area: Biomaterials and Biomimetrics - Ferguson Group Chelsea is a third-year PhD student working in the Biomaterials & Biomimetics lab for Dr. Virginia Ferguson. Chelsea came to CU Boulder with a Master's Degree in Materials Science & Engineering from Boston University. She loves applying materials science concepts to the...

Focus Area: Air Quality - Shelly Miller Group I am a PhD student of mechanical engineering working with Prof. Shelly Miller in the field of indoor air quality. For my research, I am working as the engineering team lead to gather data from hundreds of homes in Colorado that have...