Author: Ilies, Horea

Chang Liu Receives Prestigious NSF CAREER Award

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by Sarah Redmond.

His research could improve the efficiency and reliability of technologies ranging from aircraft and transportation systems to electronics cooling and data centers

chang liu
Professor Chang Liu. (Christopher LaRosa/UConn Photo)

Mechanical engineering assistant professor Chang Liu has received a prestigious Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the agency’s highest honor supporting early-career faculty who demonstrate exceptional potential as both researchers and educators.

The award recognizes Liu’s innovative work at the intersection of fluid dynamics, nonlinear systems, and control theory while supporting a research and education program that could improve the performance and efficiency of technologies ranging from aircraft to data centers.

Liu’s project, “CAREER: Nonlinear Stability, Input-Output Analysis, and Control of Time-Varying Wall-Bounded Shear Flows,” will develop new mathematical frameworks to better understand fluid flows that change over time, a longstanding challenge in engineering that affects everything from transportation and energy systems to electronics cooling.

 

 

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Anna Tarakanova Recognized by ASME For Early Career Achievements

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Her central contribution is the development of rigorous multiscale frameworks that connect molecular structure, statistical mechanics, and macroscopic behavior across complex materials.

 

Tarakanova was selected to receive the Sia Nemat-Nasser Early Career Award. (Christopher LaRosa/UConn Photo)

The American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) has recently recognized a UConn College of Engineering faculty member for her early career contributions in advancing mechanical characterization and multiscale description of biomaterials.

School of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Manufacturing Engineering associate professor Anna Tarakanova was selected to receive the Sia Nemat-Nasser Early Career Award.

The award recognizes early career research excellence in the areas of experimental, computational, and theoretical mechanics and materials. Young investigators (within 10 years after their Ph.D. degree) are honored with this award, which also has a special emphasis placed on under-represented groups.

Offered through ASME, the award was established in 2008 by their materials division.

 

 

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Seung Yeon’s NSF CAREER Award in Micro- and Nanoscale Manufacturing

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by Sarah Redmond.

SeungYeon Kang has received a prestigious NSF CAREER Award for her work on transforming how microscopic electronic devices are built.

Sally Kang
SeungYeon Kang. (Christopher LaRosa/UConn Photo)

SeungYeon Kang, an assistant professor in the UConn School of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Manufacturing Engineering, is working to transform how microscopic electronic devices are built. This research could help power a new generation of smaller, faster, and more efficient technologies.

Kang has received a prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award for her project, “3D One-step Heterogeneous Manufacturing for Integrated Circuits (3D OHMIC).” This award will help support her research on advanced manufacturing processes that operate at the micro and nanoscale.

“At its core, this project is simple but fundamental,” says Kang. “We build most electronics in flat, two-dimensional layers, even though the world around us is three-dimensional. This makes devices harder to miniaturize, slower to produce, and more resource-intensive.”

 

 

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Farhad Imani Wins NSF CAREER Award to Build Manufacturing Systems That Think

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by Sarah Redmond.

Automation dominates modern factories, but much of it still breaks when parts vary, damage is uncertain, and expert judgement is required. Farhad Imani’s project targets this failure by developing robotic manufacturing systems that can sense change and adapt in real time.

 

Professor Imani and 3rd year Ph.D. student, Zhiling Chen, working with robotic arms in his lab. (UConn Photo/Chris LaRosa)

A critical challenge is emerging in manufacturing: how to repair and restore high-value components when current systems can’t handle deviation. Factories are full of automation systems that perform well when processes are repetitive. The moment geometry shifts, the process changes, or defects evolve, they struggle.  

NSF CAREER Award recipient Farhad Imani, an assistant professor in mechanical engineering at the University of Connecticut, is tackling this challenge head-on through the development of a new class of intelligent robotic manufacturing systems that can inspect parts, interpret multimodal sensor data, and reason through uncertainty. 

 

 

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Embracing Uncertainty For Stronger Engineering Systems

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by Claire Galvin

Many real-world systems—from materials to infrastructure—contain a mix of order and randomness, a concept known as stochasticity

 

Students and faculty involved in the stochasticity research (Contributed photo).

A few years after receiving the National Science Foundation Early CAREER Award, UConn College of Engineering Assistant Professor Hongyi Xu is demonstrating how embracing uncertainty can lead to stronger, smarter engineering systems. 

Xu’s research focuses on a simple, but challenging, fact, which is that not everything in engineering is perfectly uniform. Many real-world materials contain a mix of order and randomness, a concept known as stochasticity. Rather than designing around that uncertainty, Xu has developed new computational tools that allow engineers to use it intentionally, and combine it seamlessly with ordered materials. 

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MAM Alum Powers Performance at McLaren Racing

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by Sarah Redmond.
Abhiemanyu Sukumaran in the McLaren F1 Technology Centre in Woking, Surrey, England (Contributed photo).

Abhiemanyu Sukumaran ’24 (ME) landed his dream job as a Performance Analysis Engineer at McLaren Racing after serving as president of UConn Formula SAE for two years.

When Abhiemanyu Sukumaran ’24 (ENG) attended his first virtual meeting for UConn Formula SAE, he had no idea it would redefine his future. What began as curiosity during the COVID era quickly became a passion—and ultimately a launchpad into the pinnacle of motorsport.

Today, Sukumaran is a Performance Analysis Engineer at the McLaren F1 Team, helping prepare championship-contending cars and drivers for races around the world.

In his role at McLaren Racing, Sukumaran works at the crossroads of car performance, driver performance, and future vehicle development. As he puts it, performance analysis engineers are effectively “the race engineers at the factory.”

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Meet Dr. Daniele Vivona, Our New Assistant Professor

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🎉 Welcome Dr. Daniele Vivona! 🎉

We are excited to welcome Dr. Daniele Vivona as an Assistant Professor in the School of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Manufacturing Engineering and the UConn Center for Clean Energy Engineering at the University of Connecticut!

Dr. Vivona’s research explores atom-level energy conversion processes to develop innovative design solutions for ion transport and interfacial phenomena in advanced energy materials. His work aims to drive forward next-generation electrochemical energy conversion devices, combining physics-based modeling, atomistic simulations, and data-driven approaches to bridge multiple time and length scales.

Dr. Vivona earned his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from MIT, where he was a MathWorks Mechanical Engineering Fellow, a Rohsenow Graduate Fellow, and a member of the MIT Society of Energy Fellows. He also holds B.Sc. and M.S. degrees in Energy Engineering from the Polytechnic Institute of Milan, and an M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from UConn.

MAM Graduate Students Take Top Spot at International ASME Student Hackathon

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The top three teams in the ASME Autodesk Hackathon challenge

A team of graduate students from our School of MAM’s Computational Engineering and Design (CEaD) Lab won first place in the Autodesk challenge at the ASME IDETC/CIE 2025 Student Hackathon, held August 10–17 in Anaheim, California.

Ph.D. students Kiarash Naghavi Khanghah and Hoang Anh Nguyen, advised by Dr. Hongyi Xu, earned the top spot and a $1,400 prize for their innovative solution.

This year’s hackathon drew more than 55 participants from 33 universities across six countries, challenging students to solve real-world problems in design, manufacturing, and simulation.

The UConn team tackled Autodesk’s DesignQA challenge, which tested how well AI systems could read and reason over complex engineering documents. They built a large language model–based framework that improved rule extraction, reduced model hallucinations, and achieved one of the highest scores on the benchmark, securing their first-place win.

UConn Alum Wins ASME Best Dissertation Award

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UConn graduate Zihan Wang (’24 PhD) has been honored with the ASME Design Automation Best Dissertation Award for her groundbreaking research in metamaterials. Her dissertation, “Design, Performance Evaluation and Uncertainty Analysis of Metamaterials,” was completed under the guidance of Dr. Hongyi Xu, Associate Professor in the School of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Manufacturing Engineering.

Dr. Wang’s work introduced new methods to design advanced materials using generative AI, predict their properties with deep learning, and better understand the uncertainties involved in their performance.

The ASME Design Automation Dissertation Award is given to recognize one exceptional Ph.D. dissertation in the field each year—or less often—making it a highly selective honor. Dr. Wang received the award at the ASME 2025 IDETC/CIE Conference, highlighting UConn’s leadership in training researchers to take on today’s most complex engineering challenges.