New faculty bring multidisciplinary expertise to MAE
This year, eight new faculty members have joined the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (MAE) at The Ohio State University.
Bilin Aksun Guvenc
Research Professor
Aksun Guvenc has a long history of working as a principal investigator and researcher in several automotive industry projects for major automotive Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) in Turkey. She is the co-holder of two European patents on yaw dynamics stability control and yaw rate virtual sensing for road vehicles, respectively. She is also a member of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC) technical committees on automotive control, since 2005, and on mechatronics, since 2008. She is the author of two book chapters, one book and more than 90 publications in technical journals and conferences.
Aksun Guvenc earned her bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees from Istanbul Technical University.
Clarissa Belloni
Assistant Professor
Belloni joins MAE from the University of Cincinnati, where she served as an assistant professor of mechanical engineering. Prior to that role, she was the head of research and development at Smart Hydro Power. In that position, Belloni developed hydrokinetic river turbines for rural electrification. She is an author and co-author of publications and patents in the fields of applied fluid dynamics and thermodynamic processes.
Belloni earned her Dipl.-Ing. (equivalent to a master’s degree) in mechanical engineering from the Technical University of Munich. She received her doctorate in engineering science from the University of Oxford.
Ran Dai
Assistant Professor
With a $500,000 NSF CAREER Award, Dai and her team of researchers designed a solar-powered unmanned vehicle that was adequately prepared to navigate long-duration, high-efficiency search and rescue missions. Her project aimed to harvest the energy that powers those missions from the environment instead of using limited, non-renewable fuel sources. Her experience as an engineer at Dynamic Research, Inc. prepared her for working with semi-autonomous vehicle guidance and control.
Dai earned her bachelor’s degree from Beihang University, and her master’s and doctoral degrees in aerospace engineering from Auburn University. Her post-doctoral research took place at the University of Washington, where she assisted on an energy management project for the next generation of Boeing 787 aircraft power systems.
Vicky Doan-Nguyen
Assistant Professor
Prior to her role as assistant professor, Doan-Nguyen was a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow and an Ellings Prize Fellow in the Ram Seshadri Group at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her post-doctoral work also supported UC Santa Barbara’s California NanoSystems Institute.
Doan-Nguyen earned her bachelor’s degree in chemistry and women’s studies at Yale University. She received both her master’s and doctoral degrees in materials science and engineering from the University of Pennsylvania. She is a member of the American Chemical Society, the American Physical Society, the Materials Research Society, the American Crystallographic Association, and the Electrochemical Society.
Pelagia-Iren (Perena) Gouma
Professor and Orton Chair of Ceramics Engineering
As an internationally recognized researcher, Professor Gouma has held guest faculty appointments at various international universities and research laboratories. She has been a Fulbright Scholar to UNICAMP, Brazil, and has received the Richard M. Fulrath Award from the American Ceramic Society. Gouma is also a member of the National Academy of Inventors. She has authored and co-authored more than 130 articles in peer-reviewed journals. She has 18 U.S. and international patents involving nanomaterials, photocatalysts, sensors and breathalyzers.
Before joining Ohio State, she was affiliated with the University of Texas at Arlington and the university’s research institute (UTARI). Prior to that, she was a professor at SUNY Stony Brook for 16 years, where she served as the director of the Center for Nanomaterials and Sensor Development. Gouma earned her bachelor’s degree in applied physics from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and a master’s degree in materials science and engineering from the University of Liverpool. She received her doctorate in materials science and engineering from the University of Birmingham, U.K.
Scott Noll
Research Assistant Professor
Prior to this position, Noll served as a research scientist and project leader for Ohio State’s Smart Vehicle Concepts Center, which is a National Science Foundation (NSF) Industry-University Cooperative Research Center. In that role, he worked to provide industry, government and other organizations with the means to leverage research and development investments with Ohio State centers renowned for their innovative research capabilities. In addition to serving as a research assistant professor, Noll currently serves as an affiliated faculty member in the Simulation Innovation and Modeling (SIM) Center.
Noll earned his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Ohio Northern University. He received his master’s in engineering mechanics and doctorate in mechanical engineering from Ohio State.
Alok Sutradhar
Assistant Professor
His research employs computer modeling and simulation for design, analysis, and synthesis of mechanical and biological structures. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs to explore the optimized design of multi-scale and multi-material structures. In addition to publishing more than 20 journal papers, he has a patent for the additive manufacturing of implants and implant components. He has authored a graduate-level textbook titled ‘Symmetric Galerkin Boundary Element Method,’ which was published by Springer-Verlag. His innovative research focused on facial bone and flap surgery was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal. Using his novel topology optimization technique, Sutradhar has designed craniofacial bone replacements of intricate facial bones. His research has been featured in The Economist, De Spiegel and NSF Discoveries.
He was previously an assistant professor in the Department of Plastic Surgery at The Ohio State University. Sutradhar received his PhD in structural engineering with specializations in computational mechanics and computational science/engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Richard Vasques
Assistant Professor
Vasques’ research has applications in reactor physics, neutron imaging, atmospheric sciences, remote sensing, image rendering, and computer-generated imagery. His latest paper, which explores the non-classical transport equation, was published in the Nuclear Science and Engineering journal. He is a member of the American Nuclear Society and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.
He earned his bachelor’s degree in applied and computational mathematics and his master’s degree in applied mathematics from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. He earned his doctoral degree in applied and interdisciplinary mathematics from the University of Michigan. The partner department for his interdisciplinary doctoral research was the Department of Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences.