Department of Mechanical Engineering Hires New Faculty

After exhaustive national searches, the Mechanical Engineering Department is pleased to welcome three outstanding new faculty to our program: Bikram Bhatia, Yanyu Chen, and Badri Narayanan.

Bikram Bhatia

Dr. Bhatia earned his B.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (India) and then his M.S. and Ph.D. in Mechanical Science and Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (UIUC). After completing his Ph.D. he served as a post-doc and then a senior research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His research takes two (related) directions. In his graduate work, he examined waste heat harvesting in nanoscale pyroelectric films. More recently, he has looked at solar-thermal energy conversion systems for concentrated solar power and radiative cooling applications.

Yanyu Chen

Dr. Yanyu Chen

Dr. Chen earned a B.S. degree from Wuhan University (China), an M.S. degree from Beijing Aeronautics and Astronautics, and a Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Stony Brook (SUNY Stony Brook). He then worked for a year as a post-doc at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Colorado before coming to UofL. His general research areas include solid mechanics, structural dynamics, meta-materials, and multi-functional composites. Much of his work involves computational modeling and optimization of lightweight structural systems.

Badri Narayanan

Dr. Badri Narayanan

Dr. Narayanan received his B.S. from the National Institute of Technology (India) and his M.S. from the Indian Institute of Science (India) before moving to the Colorado School of Mines to earn his Ph.D. He worked as a post-doc and then as a senior scientist at Argonne National Laboratory before joining UofL. His research is focuses on computational materials modeling at multiple length and time scales. These techniques include molecular dynamic simulations, density function models and advanced sampling methods. Using these methods, he works to describe the underlying physics involved in material processes, tailor material functionality, examine interface behavior, etc.