James Gabbard
James is a PhD student in mechanical engineering. He is currently developing a suite of software tools to simulate underwater propulsion. In his research, he uses discrete elastic rods (a differential-geometry based discretization) to simulate materials with a time-dependent resting state. James uses MATLAB’s sparse matrix tools to evolve this model with implicit time integration, increasing the maximum allowable time step in dynamic simulations. In the simulation of two-dimensional elastic ...
Alireza Fallah
Alireza is a PhD student in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. His research is focused on developing new robust and accelerated optimization methods for machine learning applications. He uses MATLAB to tune algorithms to achieve the desired trade-off between convergence rate and robustness, making use of CVX to find the best set of parameters. With the Symbolic Math Toolbox, Alireza is also able to propose a specific parameterization by solving a set of matrix ineq ...
Pasquale Antonante
Pasquale is a PhD student in aerospace engineering. He is developing general-purpose tools for estimation that are robust to corrupted information and adversarial attacks, run in real-time, and require minimal tuning. His interests include safe and trustworthy perception with application to single and multi-robot autonomous systems. He uses MATLAB on a regular basis, including the Computer Vision Toolbox and Robotics System Toolbox for his work on robust estimation. He earned his SB in comput ...
Yiyun Zhang
A PhD student in aeronautics and astronautics, Yiyun is working on the application of plasma science to aerospace engineering. Her research is on dielectric barrier discharge actuators for flow and combustion modification. Recently, Yiyun has focused on the plasma aspects of the problem, building a 1D model of the discharge and analyzing experimental results in MATLAB. She earned a BS in mechanical engineering from Purdue University and an SM in aerospace engineering from MIT.
Jin (Harvey) Yang
Jin is a PhD student in biological engineering focusing on the development of a new bottom-up synthetic biology strategy for understanding how 3D genome organization regulates genome function. He is applying super-resolution microscopy to study the dynamics of chromatin looping in live cells and uses MATLAB for image segmentation and analysis. In recent work, using MATLAB SimBiology, he developed a synthetic genetic circuit, the Equalizer, that reduces the cell-to-cell variation of expression ...
Haowei Xu
Haowei is a PhD student in nuclear science engineering whose research focuses on light-matter interaction and topological materials. Specifically, he uses coherent light (lasers) to manipulate the properties of materials and using materials to generate, detect, and manipulate light. He has also demonstrated that topological materials can have outstanding optical properties. He uses MATLAB for numerical modeling, including integration, optimization, and partial differential equations, to test ...
Tony Tohme
Tony is a PhD student in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Center for Computational Science and Engineering. His research is focused on Bayesian inference and probabilistic machine learning. Tony earned a BEng in electrical and computer engineering from American University of Beirut, Lebanon and an SM in computational science and engineering from MIT.
Huanhuan Tian
Huanhuan is a PhD student in chemical engineering. She is working on shock electrodialysis (shock ED), a new electrochemical process for water treatment that was designed and developed by the Bazant Research Group. Recent experimental results shows that shock ED can selectively remove multivalent cations, which could be promising for continuous and economical heavy metal ion removal from drinking water and industrious waste. For instance, preliminary results showed that shock ED can almost co ...
Wenhui Tang
Wenhui is a PhD student in mechanical engineering whose research focuses on the spatial and temporal self-organization of multicellular living systems in 3D during physiological and pathological processes. She uses modern microscopy to image in real time the 4D spontaneous organization of living cells and under various conditions, including different surrounding matrix mechanics and substrate curvature. Using MATLAB, she can extract data from microscopic videos and images and convert the opti ...
Rohit Supekar
Rohit is a PhD student in mechanical engineering developing continuum mathematical models for the collective dynamics in biological and engineered active fluids—for example, suspensions of swimming cells or self-propelling colloidal particles. In particular, he is developing and investigating physics-informed machine learning methods to infer partial differential equations that govern macroscopic observables directly from particle data. To achieve this, Rohit has used MATLAB for building a ...