ME Welcomes Jaydev Desai

Dr. Jaydev Desai will be joining the department in October 2006 as an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering.

Desai served as the Director of the “Program for Robotics, Intelligent Sensing, and Mechatronics (PRISM) Laboratory” at Drexel University. He holds an NSF CAREER Award for research in “Minimally Invasive Surgery Using Haptics and Vision” and is among the most accomplished young academics in medical robotics in the United States. He has performed research on bio-surgery on individual cells, ordered cell arrays or aggregates of cells; prostate brachytherapy; robot-assisted hepatic tumor resection; robotically-assisted beating heart coronary artery bypass graft (CABG); and graph theoretic framework for modeling and control of modular robotic systems.

Dr. Teng Li and Dr. Santiago Solares joined the earlier this fall semester, both as Assistant Professors of Mechanical Engineering.

Li was formerly a post-doctoral Fellow at the Harvard University Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and completed his Ph.D. in 2005 at the same institution after earlier studies at Princeton University and Tsinghua University in China. His dissertation dealt with the “Deformability of Thin Films of Electronic Materials on Polymer Substrates,” and his future interests include the micro/nano mechanics of flexible macroelectronics; MEMS and NEMS, and innovative nanoscale patterns of thin-film electronic materials with enhanced mechanical and electrical performance.

Solares completed his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology in late summer '06, where his research focused on applied computational nanotechnology. He had earlier obtained his B.S. and “Licensed Engineer” degrees in chemical engineering from the University del Valle in Guatemala City in 1993 and 1995. Upon completion of his studies, he worked for PepsiCo in Central America and in 1996 obtained an M.S. degree in Industrial Engineering from the University of Miami. He then relocated to Los Angeles with Mars Inc., where he held various technical and management positions in the R&D and Engineering departments before entering the Ph.D. program at Cal Tech.

Please welcome Jaydev Desai, Santiago Solares and Teng Li to the department and to the campus.

Published September 15, 2006