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Richard S. Lee Research Excellence Award

The Richard S. Lee Research Excellence Award is given to a select Masters or PhD graduate for an exceptionally strong dissertation, as well as a graduating senior who has demonstrated a commitment to research and who will be pursuing an advanced degree. This honor comes with a certificate and a $500 scholarship. Congratulations goes to Xiaoqiang Xu, PhD, and Jason Hamechand, BE. They received this award during the 2025 Mechanical Engineering Convocation ceremony. Here's a bit about these excellent researchers:

Xiaoqiang XuUnder the guidance of Professor Shikui Chen, Xiaoqiang Xu has been selected as an exceptional PhD candidate whose research accomplishments, leadership, and professional development make him highly deserving of this award. His work has led to five peer-reviewed journal publications, including articles in Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering and International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer, and several conference papers in prestigious venues such as ASME IDETC/CIE and InterPACK. His innovative contributions to topology optimization for thermal management, additive manufacturing, and multiphysics modeling have been recognized with multiple awards, including the 2023 Graduate Research Symposium Poster Award at Stony Brook University. Beyond his research, Xiaoqiang has completed highly competitive internships at Toyota and Apple and demonstrated strong service to the academic community by serving as a reviewer for top journals. We commend Xiaoqiang for his impressive academic record, professional growth, and broad impact in research and education.

 

Jason HamechandUnder the guidance of Professor Spencer Zimmerman, Jason became interested in parallel image processing for turbulence measurements and taught himself parallel reduction and basic CUDA programming for Nvidia GPUs. He continued this work for two semesters, successfully converting a holographic image back-propagation code from MATLAB to CUDA, resulting in a substantial reduction in run time. Jason will be pursuing a research-track Master’s Degree at Johns Hopkins University in the fall.

 

 

Chancellor’s Award for Student Excellence

HaileeShehu_CASEHailee Shehu was recognized with the 2025 Chancellor’s Award for Student Excellence (CASE) — the State University of New York’s highest honor bestowed on a student.

The award celebrates academic excellence, leadership, campus involvement, community service and creative or performing arts. This year’s honorees were celebrated during an awards ceremony on April 29 in Albany, New York.

Hailee is a mechanical engineering major in the WISE Honors Program. She is a first-generation student and co-founder of the nonprofit Lindenhurst Launchpad. She also leads Stony Brook’s American Society of Mechanical Engineers chapter and mentors fellow students.

 

SOAR Program Accepts New Student

JohnLi_SOARJohn Li, a rising senior in Mechanical Engineering, has been accepted into the prestigious SUNY Summer Opportunities for Academic Research (SOAR) program. John will be conducting research in the Materials and Mechanics Laboratory under the guidance of Professor Kedar Kirane and Ph.D. student Wanru Miao.


The SOAR program supports academically talented SUNY undergraduates—especially those who are first-generation college students or from economically disadvantaged backgrounds—by offering hands-on research experiences.

This summer, John will spend over two months working on a Department of Defense–funded project through the Office of Naval Research. His work will focus on characterizing compressive failure in woven composite materials, particularly around circular holes—common features in structural applications. Through open-hole compression (OHC) testing, John will help generate valuable data on strength reduction and failure mechanisms like fiber kinking and delamination, contributing to the safe design and certification of advanced composite materials.

 

Student selected for Soft Flyers Group

Christina Wong_Soft Flyers

Congratulations to Christina Wong from the College of Arts and Sciences, who has been selected to join the Soft Flyers Group in the Department of Mechanical Engineering as part of the 2025 URECA Summer Research Program.

Over the 10-week program, Christina will contribute to an exciting swarm robotics project, focusing on developing a mechanism that enables two robotic agents to attach to one another—an important step toward advancing coordinated movement and collective behavior in robotic swarms.

 

Simons STEM Scholar 

Elda_STEMScholarElda Berhaneyessushas been selected as a scholar for the Explorations in STEM program — a competitive, 10-week full-time summer research experience co-administered by URECA and the Career Center, and proudly supported by The Stony Brook Simons STEM Scholars Program. 

Under the mentorship of Professor Lifeng Wang, Elda will be conducting research on “Development and Evaluation of Biodegradable Lattice Structures for Enhanced Energy Dissipation” — a cutting-edge project with meaningful applications in sustainability and materials science.

As part of this immersive program, Elda will join a vibrant community of undergraduate researchers, engage in professional development workshops (on topics like science communication, poster presentations, and graduate school applications), and present her work at the 2025 Summer Symposium on August 1.

Currently a freshman and proud Simons STEM Scholar, Elda is pursuing a degree in mechanical engineering and is passionate about advancing innovation in STEM — while also championing representation and equity in the field.

 

DURIP Award

DURIP AwardThe Defense University Research Instrumentation Program (DURIP) provides funding for university-based research that is critical to advancements in Navy-related studies. Professors from the Mechanical Engineering department teamed up on a project titled, "A Computational and Physical Framework for Rapid Prototyping of Robotics Systems with Embodied Intelligence." The principal investigator Dr. Anurag Purwar, along with Co-PIs, Dr. William Stewart, Dr. Kedar Kirane, Dr. Shanshan Yao, Dr. Shikui Chen, Dr. Nilanjan Chakraborty, and Dr. David Hwang had this project funded for $505,332 by the Department of Defense Office of Naval Research (ONR) to establish a sophisticated System of Instruments to advance the research on areas crucial to the Navy. They identified four primary areas of focus: multimodal aerial robotics, collaborative robotic (cobot) exoskeletons, soft embedded intelligence, and component and system level mechanical characterization. The system being acquired is a complementary suite of instruments including a CNC laser, material mechanics test stage, a bio 3D printer, and a 6-axis robotic arm.

 

CEAS First Annual Awards Ceremony

MEC TREES AWARD

The College of Engineering and Applied Sciences (CEAS) held its first awards ceremony on January 21. The ceremony honored research achievements and excellence in teaching and service for faculty and staff. Below, we have highlighted the recipients from our Mechanical Engineering department.

 
 
 
 
2022-2023 
Teachers Rated Excellent Educators by their Students (TREES)
  • Fu-Pen Chiang
  • Carlos Colosqui
  • Jie Gao
  • David Hwang
  • Joseph Schurz
 
2023-2024
Teachers Rated Excellent Educators by their Students (TREES)
  • Jie Gao
  • Austin Giordano
  • David Hwang
  • Kedar Kirane
  • Joseph Schurz
 
CEAS Award for Excellence in Teaching - Jie Gao
CEAS Award for Excellence in Professional Service - Noah Machtay
CEAS Award for Diversity Leadership - Carlos Colosqui
 

New Patent Issued: System and Method to ConductImin_BoneSurgery_Patent Bone Surgery

Professor Imin Kao, Ph.D (Mechanical Engineering), and Dr. Fazel Khan, MD (Orthopaedics) were recently issued a patent titled "System and Method to Conduct Bone Surgery." Along with their students, they are dealing with real clinical/surgical problems to accurately reproduce the pre-operative planning to remove osteosarcoma. They have developed new and innovative technologies to solve these problems.  They anticipate these solutions will make a big difference for patients and likely significantly change how many orthopedic surgeries are done. Learn more here.

 

ONR Grant: Multi-scale modeling of 3D multi-axial compressive failures in unidirectional and woven composites

Kedar_ONR GrantAssociate Professor Kedar Kirane was awarded a grant by The Office of Naval Research (ONR) for a three-year project titled "Multi-scale modeling of 3D multi-axial compressive failures in unidirectional and woven composites." The compressive failure of unidirectional (UD) and woven fiber composites under multi-axial stress is a complex, multi-scale phenomenon that current models cannot reliably predict. The proposed research addresses this gap by developing multi-mechanism, multi-scale constitutive models for compressive failure and a standardized process for model parameter identification through experiments. If successful, this work will produce versatile models capable of predicting micro-mechanical effects and reducing ambiguity in parameter calibration, thus significantly enhancing the reliability of computer-aided design for composite structures. These advancements will benefit various applications, including naval and aerospace engineering.  

 

SBU Alumni Give Back to Students

Stony Brook Alumni Frank Fischer ('97) and his wife Michele Fischer ('99) have been giving back to Stony Brook students since graduating with various scholarships and funds. Recently, they were inspired to establish the Frank and Michele Fischer Endowed Scholarship to benefit students in CEAS and SoMAS. Frank majored in mechanical engineering and credits his interest in the business side of engineering to SUNY Distinguished Professor Fu-Pen Chiang. “Professor Chiang was instrumental in helping me think about my life and career after Stony Brook. He was a great mentor.”

Read more about their story and impact here.

If you feel inspired to make a difference,  you can contribute here.

 

"Mastering" Mechanical Engineering

Mastering MEC Event

The Mechanical Engineering Department, in collaboration with the Stony Brook University Career Center, held a "Mastering" Mechanical Engineering Information Session on November 13. This session was designed to provide valuable insights to students considering graduate studies in Mechanical Engineering at Stony Brook University. During this session, they heard directly from current graduate students, faculty, and a panel of professionals about career opportunities Mechanical Engineering can offer in the industry.

 

SUNY Distinguished Professor Retires

Fu-Pen RetirementOn November 8, the Mechanical Engineering Department honored SUNY Distinguished  Professor Fu-Pen Chiang as we celebrated his retirement after 57 years with Stony Brook University. Family, friends, and colleagues gathered at Charles B. Wang Center to honor his career and impact across generations of students, faculty, and research. Learn more here.

 

 

New Patent Issued: System and Method for Identifying Fractures in Digitized X-Rays

Professor Imin Kao, Ph.D (Mechanical Engineering), along with co-inventors, Faisal Khan, MDImin_XRAY_Patent (Orthopaedics), and Carlos Gabriel Helguero, Ph.D (Mechanical Engineering) were recently issued a patent titled "System and Method of Identifying Fractures in Digitized X-Rays."

A method is developed for identifying one or more fractures in a digitized X-ray image, flagging fractures based on the digital X-ray image, and placing a visual indication of a possible fracture on the modified X-ray image corresponding to the location of each flagged pixel. The method can facilitate the detection of hairline cracks, which can often be missed or neglected. Learn more here.

 

Student and Faculty Social hosted by ASME

ASME_9.30.24

The American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) hosted a "Student and Faculty Social" on September 30. We spoke with Hailee Shehu, ASME president, who was very pleased with the turnout and engagement at the event.  

"This was only our second student and faculty networking event, and seeing the growth from our event last semester was very exciting. We can't wait to bring it back again next semester!"

 

OVPR Seed Grant Winners

An OVPR Seed grant has been awarded for the project, "Data-Enabled Manipulation Planning and Control for Autonomous Robotic Surgical Assistant." This is a collaborative research effort involving Robotics and AI (Nilanjan Chakraborty,  Associate Professor, Mechanical Engineering), Solid Mechanics (Kedar Kirane, Associate Professor, Mechanical Engineering), Human Computer Interaction (IV Ramakrishnan, Professor, Computer Science) and Surgery (Dr. Georgios Georgiakis, Department of Surgery, Renaissance School of Medicine). 

The overarching vision of this research is to build a robotic surgical assistant that can assist a surgeon by autonomously performing routine surgical tasks. A key step in realizing this vision is to endow robots with the ability to interact with and manipulate soft/deformable objects to perform tasks like piercing, suturing etc. Although robotic manipulation has been studied for a few decades now, much of the literature studies manipulation of rigid objects. The study of manipulation of rigid objects is a nascent field. Thus, the scope of this seed project is to develop novel data-guided planning and control algorithms that exploit the physics of fracture of deformable objects to allow robotic arms to use tools for piercing and cutting and enabling their use for suturing and incision. Learn more here.

 

Professor Ge receives ASME Dedicated Service Award

Jeff_ASME Dedication AwardProfessor Ge received the Dedicated Service Award at the 2024 ASME International Design Engineering Technical Conference in Washington, DC. The American Society of Mechanical Engineers created the Dedicated Service Award to honor dedicated voluntary service to the Society marked by outstanding performance, demonstrated effective leadership, prolonged and committed service, devotion, enthusiasm and faithfulness. Congratulations, Professor Ge!

 

 

 

 

 

 

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