ME welcomes new faculty members
August 24, 2015
The Mechanical Engineering department welcomes Dr. Lei Chen and Dr. Shanti Bhushan who joined the faculty ranks in Fall 2015 as Assistant Professors.
Lei Chen received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Materials Processing Engineering from Huazhong University of Science & Technology in China, in 2005 and 2007, respectively. Dr. Chen received his Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the National University of Singapore in 2012. Chen was employed as a research scientist in the Institute of High Performance Computing in Singapore from 2011 to 2012, and worked as a research fellow at the University of Southampton, UK from 2012-2013. Chen continued his postdoctoral work in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, and Engineering Science and Mechanics at The Pennsylvania State University from 2013 to 2015.
Dr. Chen’s research is focused on computational mechanics and microstructure modeling, with an emphasis on energy storage systems (e.g., lithium-ion batteries) and additive manufacturing alloys. To date, he has published over 45 papers in top international journals including Nature, Nano letters, JPS, CMAME, IJNME, EFM, etc. He is a member of the International Association for Computational Mechanics (IACM), the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), and The Electrochemical Society from 2012. He has received several awards from universities and organizations worldwide including the prestigious Chinese Excellent Self-financed Student Abroad Award in 2012 and the President Graduate Fellowship Award at the National University of Singapore in 2009. He is an Editorial Board Member of the International Journal of Mechanics and Applications and the International Journal of Advanced Composites. He has delivered more than 20 presentations in international conferences and local workshops or seminars, including an invited talk at the International Conference on Computational Methods 2014 in Cambridge.
Shanti Bhushan received his Ph.D. degree in Aerospace Engineering from Mississippi State University in 2003 and continued his post doctoral work as research associate at Duke University, as research scientist at University of Iowa, and research professor in the Center of Advance Vehicular systems (CAVS) at Mississippi State University.
Dr. Bhushan’s research interests cover the wide area of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) with emphasis in turbulent flow modeling and simulation. He has over 45 publications in peer-reviewed journals, conferences and book chapters for a diverse fluid turbulence fields ranging for turbulence modeling, ship hydrodynamics, atmospheric sciences, hydrology, and bio-fluids to name a few. Dr. Bhushan has participated as principal investigator or co-principal investigator on 13 funded research projects totaling over $1.5 Million in expenditures funded by external agencies such as ONR, NASA, NSF, DOE and ERDC.