From cutting-edge robotics, design, and bioengineering to sustainable energy solutions, ocean engineering, nanotechnology, and progressive materials science, MechE students and their advisors are doing incredibly progressive work. The graduate students highlighted here represent a snapshot of the nice work in progress this spring across the Department of Mechanical Engineering, and display the ways the longer term of this field is as limitless because the imaginations of its practitioners.
Democratizing design through AI
Lyle Regenwetter
Hometown: Champaign, Illinois
Advisor: Assistant Professor Faez Ahmed
Interests: Food, climbing, skiing, soccer, tennis, cooking
Lyle Regenwetter finds excitement within the prospect of generative AI to “democratize” design and enable inexperienced designers to tackle complex design problems. His research explores latest training methods through which generative AI models could be taught to implicitly obey design constraints and synthesize higher-performing designs. Knowing that prospective designers often have an intimate knowledge of the needs of users, but may otherwise lack the technical training to create solutions, Regenwetter also develops human-AI collaborative tools that allow AI models to interact and support designers in popular CAD software and real design problems.
Solving a whale of an issue
Loïcka Baille
Hometown: L’Escale, France
Advisor: Daniel Zitterbart
Interests: Being outdoors — scuba diving, spelunking, or climbing. Sailing on the Charles River, martial arts classes, and playing volleyball
Loïcka Baille’s research focuses on developing distant sensing technologies to review and protect marine life. Her foremost project revolves around improving onboard whale detection technology to stop vessel strikes, with a special concentrate on protecting North Atlantic right whales. Baille can also be involved in an ongoing study of Emperor penguins. Her team visits Antarctica annually to tag penguins and gather data to boost their understanding of penguin population dynamics and draw conclusions regarding the general health of the ecosystem.
Water, water anywhere
Carlos Díaz-Marín
Hometown: San José, Costa Rica
Advisor: Professor Gang Chen | Former Advisor: Professor Evelyn Wang
Interests: Recent England mountaineering, biking, and dancing
Carlos Díaz-Marín designs and synthesizes inexpensive salt-polymer materials that may capture large amounts of humidity from the air. He goals to vary the way in which we generate potable water from the air, even in arid conditions. Along with water generation, these salt-polymer materials may also be used as thermal batteries, able to storing and reusing heat. Beyond the scientific applications, Díaz-Marín is happy to proceed doing research that may have big social impacts, and that finds and explains latest physical phenomena. As a LatinX person, Díaz-Marín can also be driven to assist increase diversity in STEM.
Scalable fabrication of nano-architected materials
Somayajulu Dhulipala
Hometown: Hyderabad, India
Advisor: Assistant Professor Carlos Portela
Interests: Space exploration, taekwondo, meditation.
Somayajulu Dhulipala works on developing lightweight materials with tunable mechanical properties. He’s currently working on methods for the scalable fabrication of nano-architected materials and predicting their mechanical properties. The flexibility to fine-tune the mechanical properties of specific materials brings versatility and flexibility, making these materials suitable for a big selection of applications across multiple industries. While the research applications are quite diverse, Dhulipala is obsessed with making space habitable for humanity, a vital step toward becoming a spacefaring civilization.
Ingestible health-care devices
Jimmy McRae
Hometown: Woburn, Massachusetts
Advisor: Associate Professor Giovani Traverso
Interests: Anything basketball-related: playing, watching, going to games, organizing hometown tournaments
Jimmy McRae goals to drastically improve diagnostic and therapeutic capabilities through noninvasive health-care technologies. His research focuses on leveraging materials, mechanics, embedded systems, and microfabrication to develop novel ingestible electronic and mechatronic devices. This ranges from ingestible electroceutical capsules that modulate hunger-regulating hormones to devices able to continuous ultralong monitoring and remotely triggerable actuations from inside the stomach. The principles that guide McRae’s work to develop devices that function in extreme environments could be applied far beyond the gastrointestinal tract, with applications for outer space, the ocean, and more.
Freestyle BMX meets machine learning
Eva Nates
Hometown: Narberth, Pennsylvania
Advisor: Professor Peko Hosoi
Interests: Rowing, running, biking, mountaineering, baking
Eva Nates is working with the Australian Cycling Team to create a tool to categorise Bicycle Motocross Freestyle (BMX FS) tricks. She uses a singular value decomposition method to conduct a principal component evaluation of the time-dependent point-tracking data of an athlete and their bike during a run to categorise each trick. The 2024 Olympic team hopes to include this tool of their training workflow, and Nates worked alongside the team at their facilities on the Gold Coast of Australia during MIT’s Independent Activities Period in January.
Augmenting Astronauts with Wearable Limbs
Erik Ballesteros
Hometown: Spring, Texas
Advisor: Professor Harry Asada
Interests: Cosplay, Star Wars, Lego bricks
Erik Ballesteros’s research seeks to support astronauts who’re conducting planetary extravehicular activities through the usage of supernumerary robotic limbs (SuperLimbs). His work is tailored toward design and control manifestation to help astronauts with post-fall recovery, human-leader/robot-follower quadruped locomotion, and coordinated manipulation between the SuperLimbs and the astronaut to perform tasks like excavation and sample handling.
