School of Engineering
Showing 1-10 of 35 Results
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Juan Alonso
Vance D. and Arlene C. Coffman Professor and the James and Anna Marie Spilker Chair of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics
BioProf. Alonso is the founder and director of the Aerospace Design Laboratory (ADL) where he specializes in the development of high-fidelity computational design methodologies to enable the creation of realizable and efficient aerospace systems. Prof. Alonso’s research involves a large number of different manned and unmanned applications including transonic, supersonic, and hypersonic aircraft, helicopters, turbomachinery, and launch and re-entry vehicles. He is the author of over 200 technical publications on the topics of computational aircraft and spacecraft design, multi-disciplinary optimization, fundamental numerical methods, and high-performance parallel computing. Prof. Alonso is keenly interested in the development of an advanced curriculum for the training of future engineers and scientists and has participated actively in course-development activities in both the Aeronautics & Astronautics Department (particularly in the development of coursework for aircraft design, sustainable aviation, and UAS design and operation) and for the Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering (ICME) at Stanford University. He was a member of the team that currently holds the world speed record for human powered vehicles over water. A student team led by Prof. Alonso also holds the altitude record for an unmanned electric vehicle under 5 lbs of mass.
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Mansur Arief
Research Engineer
BioI am a research engineer at Stanford Intelligent Systems Lab (SISL) and Mineral-X. I received my Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon in 2023 and a master's degree in Industrial and Operations Engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. My work mostly focuses on the development of trustworthy AI for safety and sustainability domains. Applications include safety validation of cyber-physical systems, decision making under uncertainty for safe subsurface resource planning and operations, and supply chain designs for energy transition commodities.
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Manan Arya
Assistant Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsManan Arya leads the Morphing Space Structures Laboratory. His research is on structures that can adapt their shape to respond to changing requirements. Examples include deployable structures for spacecraft that can stow in constrained volumes for launch and then unfold to larger sizes in space, terrestrial structures with variable geometry, and morphing robots. Key research thrusts include lightweight fiber-reinforced composite materials to enable innovative designs for flexible structures, and the algorithmic generation of the geometry of morphing structures – the arrangement of stiff and compliant elements – to enable novel folding mechanisms.
He has published more than 20 journal and conference papers and has been awarded 5 US patents. Prior to joining Stanford, he was a Technologist at the Advanced Deployable Structures Laboratory at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, where he developed and tested breakthrough designs for space structures, including deployable reflectarrays, starshades, and solar arrays. -
Somil Bansal
Assistant Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics
BioSomil Bansal is an assistant professor at the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford. Before joining Stanford, he was an assistant professor in the ECE department at the University of Southern California. He received an MS and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS) from the University of California at Berkeley in 2014 and 2020, respectively. Before that, he obtained a B.Tech. in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur in 2012. After his PhD, he spent a year as a Research Scientist at Waymo (formerly known as the Google Self-Driving Car project). He has also collaborated closely with companies like Skydio, Google, Boeing, as well as NASA AMES/JPL. Somil is broadly interested in developing mathematical tools and algorithms for the control and analysis of safety-critical autonomous and robotic systems, with a special emphasis on ensuring the safety of learning-enabled systems. Somil has received several awards, most notably the NSF CAREER award, the Eli Jury Award at UC Berkeley for his doctoral research, the RSS Pioneer Award, and the Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award.
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Juan Blanch
Sr Research Engineer
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsMy research focuses on the design of navigation integrity algorithms for safety critical applications (like air navigation and autonomous driving). I am interested in both the design of practical algorithms that provide the required safety margins, and in the theoretical limits on the performance of the integrity monitoring algorithms.
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Brian Cantwell
Edward C. Wells Professor in the School of Engineering and Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Emeritus
BioProfessor Cantwell's research interests are in the area of turbulent flow. Recent work has centered in three areas: the direct numerical simulation of turbulent shear flows, theoretical studies of the fine-scale structure of turbulence, and experimental measurements of turbulent structure in flames. Experimental studies include the development of particle-tracking methods for measuring velocity fields in unsteady flames and variable density jets. Research in turbulence simulation includes the development of spectral methods for simulating vortex rings, the development of topological methods for interpreting complex fields of data, and simulations of high Reynolds number compressible and incompressible wakes. Theoretical studies include predictions of the asymptotic behavior of drifting vortex pairs and vortex rings and use of group theoretical methods to study the nonlinear dynamics of turbulent fine-scale motions. Current projects include studies of fast-burning fuels for hybrid propulsion and decomposition of nitrous oxide for space propulsion.
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Fu-Kuo Chang
Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics
BioProfessor Chang's primary research interest is in the areas of multi-functional materials and intelligent structures with particular emphases on structural health monitoring, intelligent self-sensing diagnostics, and multifunctional energy storage composites for transportation vehicles as well as safety-critical assets and medical devices. His specialties include embedded sensors and stretchable sensor networks with built-in self-diagnostics, integrated diagnostics and prognostics, damage tolerance and failure analysis for composite materials, and advanced multi-physics computational methods for multi-functional structures. Most of his work involves system integration and multi-disciplinary engineering in structural mechanics, electrical engineering, signal processing, and multi-scale fabrication of materials. His recent research topics include: Multifunctional energy storage composites, Integrated health management for aircraft structures, bio-inspired intelligent sensory materials for fly-by-feel autonomous vehicles, active sensing diagnostics for composite structures, self-diagnostics for high-temperature materials, etc.
