Faces of Research - Profile Article

Having retired as Vice Provost, Dr. Vito is a Professor Emeritus of Mechanical Engineering and currently works part-time. He was one of the founders of The InVenture Prize and has been pivotal in the creation, development, evolution and delivery of the CREATE-X program. His startup expertise is in the area of medical devices, an area where he has conducted research and holds several patents.

Dr. Dixon began at Georgia Tech in August 2009 as an Assistant Professor. Prior to his current appointment, he was a staff scientist at Ecole Polytechnique Federal de Lausanne (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology - Lausanne) doing research on tissue-engineered models of the lymphatic system. Dr. Dixon received his Ph.D. in biomedical engineering while working in the Optical Biosensing Laboratory, where he developed an imaging system for measuring lymphatic flow and estimating wall shear stress in contracting lymphatic vessels. 

Susan Napier Thomas holds the Woodruff Professorship and is a Professor (full) with tenure of Mechanical Engineering in the Parker H. Petit Institute of Bioengineering and Bioscience at the Georgia Institute of Technology where she holds adjunct appointments in Biomedical Engineering and Biological Science and is a member of the Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University. Prior to this appointment, she was a Whitaker postdoctoral scholar at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (one of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology) and received her B.S.

Dr. Arvanitis joined Georgia Institute of Technology as a joint Assistant Professor at the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering in August 2016. Before joining Georgia Institute of Technology he was Instructor (Research Faculty) at Harvard Medical Scholl and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Dr. Arvanitis has also worked as a research fellow in the Biomedical Ultrasonics, Biotherapy and Biopharmaceuticals Laboratory at the Institute of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Oxford.

Dr. Varenberg’s research area is Tribology – the science and technology of interacting surfaces that allow for game-changing advancements ranging from making fire and inventing wheel in the past, to enabling human joint replacement in the present. Dr. Varenberg’s main focus is on bionic tribology and green tribology, but, to enhance the public’s interest in tribology science, he also seeks to uncover tribology from daily life, with examples of works on safety razors and table tennis paddles.

Dr. Yuhang Hu Joined the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology as an assistant professor in August 2018. Prior to that, Dr. Hu was an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 2015 to 2018. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in the area of Solid Mechanics. She worked in the area of Materials Chemistry as a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard from 2011 to 2014.

Zhou's research interests concern material behavior over a wide range of length scales. His research emphasizes finite element and molecular dynamics simulations as well as experimental characterization with digital diagnostics. The objective is to provide guidance for the enhancement of performance through material design and synthesis.

Aaron Young is an Associate Professor in Mechanical Engineering and is interested in designing and improving powered orthotic and prosthetic control systems for persons with stroke, neurological injury or amputation. His previous experience includes a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Michigan in the Human Neuromechanics Lab working with exoskeletons and powered orthoses to augment human performance. He has also worked on the control of upper and lower limb prostheses at the Center for Bionic Medicine (CBM) at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago.

Wang's research is in the areas of design, manufacturing, and Integrated computational materials engineering. He is interested in computer-aided design, geometric modeling and processing, computer-aided manufacturing, multiscale simulation, and uncertainty quantification.