Faculty
Oluwaseyi Balogun
Oluwaseyi Balogun is an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northwestern University. He received his B.S. degree from the University of Lagos, Nigeria, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Boston University, all in Mechanical Engineering. Dr. Balogun’s research focuses on nanoscale heat transport measurements and thermal properties of small-scale materials, experimental mechanics of soft biological materials, and optical and elastic wave sensors. His research is relevant to applications that involve nanoscale heat conduction, elastic wave propagation, optical sensing, and nanometrology. He currently serves as the co-director for the Center for Smart Structures and Materials at Northwestern University. He is a member of the IEEE UFFC and IEEE Nanotechnology Societies and a recipient of the 2020 & 2021 IEEE Nanotechnology Council Distinguished Lecturer awards.
Postdoctoral Scholars
Eleonora Isotta
Eleonora received her Ph.D. from University of Trento, studying the effect of crystal structure on thermoelectric properties. Currently, Eleonora is working on local techniques for the measurement of thermal conductivity at grain boundaries.
Graduate Students
Baojie Lu
Baojie is exploring thermoreflectance techniques to study the thermal properties of interfaces in layered materials.
Ziwei Wang
Ziwei is studying the propagation of shear waves in hydrogels and hyper-viscoelastic materials. These materials serve as surrogate models for environmental biofilms and biological tissues such as the skin and cornea.
Shizhou Jiang
Shizhou is exploring optothermal Raman spectroscopy and frequency domain thermoreflectance to characterize the anisotropic thermal conductivity of layered Van der Waals materials and for spatial mapping of grain boundary thermal conductivity.
Evan Dieppa
Evan is studying the viscoelastic and adhesive behavior of environmental biofilms using the optical coherence elastography and laser spallation methods.
Richmond Odufisan
Richmond is developing computational models for simulating wave propagation in materials to understand and predict their behavior, both in the context of incoherent waves (nanoscale thermal transport) and coherent waves (viscoelastic response of biological tissue).
Alumni
| Name | Project Title | Degree Completed | Current Affiliation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Phillip Ahn | Nanomechanical Characterization with Near-field Optical Microscopy | PhD, 2013 | Intel Corporation |
| Bradley Sherman | Thin Film Delamination using a High Power Pulsed Laser Materials Interaction | PhD, 2016 | |
| Xiang Chen | Plasmonic Nanoatennas for Ultrasfast Opto-mechanical Sensing | PhD, 2017 | |
| Jialun Han | Design of Flexible Phononic Crystals and Continuum Topological Insulators | PhD, 2018 | Dassault Systemes |
| Matthew Ford | Reinventing the Wheel: Stress Analysis, Stability, and Optimization of the Bicycle Wheel | PhD, 2018 | University of Washington, Tacoma |
| Li Zhang | Numerical and Experimental Study of Aperture Based Laser Induced Forward Transfer Technique | PhD, 2018 | |
| Hong-Cin Liou | Modeling of Elastic Wave Propagation and Viscoelastic Characterization of Biofilms and Soft Materials | PhD, 2019 | Biomedical Engineering Department, University of Washington, Seattle. |
| Timinyo Owei | Photoacoustic Characterization of Nanoporous Gold | MS, 2010 | |
| Matthew Richeson | Photothermal Characterization of Nanomechanical Resonators | MS, 2013 | |
| Shuqing Zhang | Design and Characterization of a Biaxial Strain Device for Two-dimensional Materials | MS, 2015 | |
| Manon Voison Leprice | Elastic Wave Isolation in an Auxetic-honeycomb Lattice: Tunable Mechanical Filter | MS, 2019 | Ecole polytechnique Federale de Laussanne |
| Longhan Zhang | Molecular Simulations of Heat Flow in Mixed Dimensional MoS2-C70 Heterostructures | MS, 2021 |