Instructors
Meet our experienced team of instructors.
Lead Instructors
Michael Tonks
Associate Professor and Alumni Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Florida
Michael Tonks is an associate professor of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Florida (UF). Prior to joining UF in Fall 2017, he was an assistant professor of Nuclear Engineering at the Pennsylvania State University for 2 years and a staff scientist in the Fuels Modeling and Simulation Department at Idaho National Laboratory for 6 years. Prof. Tonks was the original creator of the mesoscale fuel performance tool MARMOT and lead its development for five years. He helped to pioneer the approach taken in the Nuclear Energy Advanced Modeling and Simulation (NEAMS) program to use multiscale modeling and simulation (both atomistic and mesoscale) to inform the development of materials models for the BISON tool that are based on microstructure rather than burn-up, and he won the NEAMS Excellence Award for that work in 2014 and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 2017. His research uses mesoscale modeling and simulation coupled with experimental data to investigate the impact of irradiation induced microstructure evolution on material performance. He is also investigating and applying advanced methods for verification and validation with statistical uncertainty quantification.
Jacob Hochhalter
Assistant Professor, University of Utah
Jacob Hochhalter joined the University of Utah as an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering in 2018, where he initiated the Materials Prognosis from Integrated Modeling & Experiment (M’) Lab to study emergent structural and material prognosis issues that involve the multiscale and stochastic nature of plasticity and fatigue cracking in structural materials. He also consults for the NASA Engineering and Safety Center (NESC) Materials Technical Discipline Team on material microstructure, fatigue, and fracture related assessments. Prior to that transition, from 2009-2018, he served as a Civil Servant Materials Research Engineer and technical lead for the Damage Science Group at NASA Langley Research Center. He earned a PhD from Cornell University in 2010 where he studied microscale fatigue crack initiation mechanisms as a NASA Graduate Student Research Fellow. Dr. Hochhalter has received the NASA Group Achievement Award for work on environmentally-assisted cracking, the NESC Engineering Excellence Award for the development of innovative test and analysis techniques for the certification of fracture-critical components, and the NASA Early Career Achievement Medal.
Sankaran Mahadevan
Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering; John R. Murray Sr. Professor of Engineering; Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Vanderbilt University
Sankaran Mahadevan has more than thirty years of research and teaching experience in uncertainty quantification, risk and reliability analysis, machine learning, structural health diagnosis and prognosis, and decision-making under uncertainty. He has applied these methods to a variety of structures and materials in civil, mechanical and aerospace engineering. His research has been extensively funded by NSF, NASA, DOE, DOD, FAA, NIST, as well as GM, Chrysler, GE, Union Pacific, and Mitsubishi. He is the author of two textbooks on reliability analysis and uncertainty quantification and more than 600 technical papers, including 300 peer-reviewed journal papers. Prof. Mahadevan is currently Managing Editor of ASCE-ASME Journal of Risk and Uncertainty in Engineering Systems, and Vice-Chair of the ASME V&V50 Subcommittee on VVUQ in Advanced Manufacturing. He is a Fellow of AIAA, Engineering Mechanics Institute (ASCE), and Prognostics and Health Management Society.
David Moorcroft
Team Coordinator, Biodynamics Research Team, Federal Aviation Administration
David Moorcroft is the lead of the Biodynamic Research Team at the Federal Aviation Administration where he focuses on occupant protection and crashworthiness. He holds undergraduate and post-graduate degrees from the Engineering Science and Mechanics department at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. During his 18 years with the FAA, he has emphasized the need for establishing rigorous approaches for determining computational model credibility. Since 2004, David has been involved with the creation of verification and validation standards. He is an associate editor for the ASME Journal of Verification, Validation, and Uncertainty Quantification. Currently, David is chair of the ASME Verification and Validation in Computational Modeling and Simulation standards committee.
Instructors
Kenneth Aycock
Staff Fellow Mechanical Engineer, U.S. Food and Drug Administration
Kenneth Aycock performs experimental and computational continuum mechanics research and contributes to the regulatory review of premarket medical devices applications at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Specific areas of interest include patient-specific mechanics and hemodynamics, implantable cardiovascular devices, fatigue failure, and nonlinear materials—in particular, superelastic nitinol. His current research focuses on demonstrating best practices in verification, validation, and uncertainty quantification of physics-based computational models following FDA guidance and ASME V&V standards. Before joining FDA, Kenneth received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Brigham Young University—Idaho and a Ph.D. in Bioengineering from The Pennsylvania State University.
Joshua Kaizer
Technical Reviewer, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission
Joshua Kaizer is a regulator at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. For 15 years, he has reviewed the Verification, Validation, and Uncertainty (VVUQ) analysis associated with the computer simulations performed to demonstrate reactor safety. His primary areas of review include thermal-hydraulics, statistical methods, and data-driven models. He is a member of ASME’s VVUQ standards committee, NAFEMS working group on simulation governance, and is an associate editor of the Journal of VVUQ.
Thomas L. Paez
Consultant
During his 50-year career, Thomas Paez has worked in industry, taught at the university level, and worked at Sandia National Laboratories, both in the shock and vibration laboratory and in modeling and analysis assignments. His key areas of research are in the field of probabilistic structural dynamics, including basic and advanced random vibrations; model validation; and probabilistic modeling. He has taught over one hundred random vibration and mechanical shock short courses and does consulting work in probabilistic structural dynamics. He earned BS, MS, and Ph.D. degrees in engineering.
Anthony D. Rollett
U.S. Steel Professor of Metallurgical Engineering & Materials Science and Faculty Co-Director, Next Manufacturing Center, Carnegie Mellon University
Anthony Rollett's research focuses on microstructural evolution and microstructure-property relationships in 3D. Interests include 3D printing of metals, materials for energy conversion systems, strength of materials, constitutive relations, microstructure, texture, anisotropy, grain growth, recrystallization, formability, extreme value statistics and stereology. Important recent results include development of a spectral approach to eigenstrain problems, validation of the 3D elasto-viscoplastic FFT code against synchrotron x-ray diffraction data, definition of process windows in 3D printing through characterization of porosity, prediction of solidification microstructure, the appearance of new grains during grain growth, and grain size stabilization. He has been a professor of Materials Science & Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University since 1995 and before that was with the Los Alamos National Laboratory. He is a Fellow of several professional societies. He is the co-Director of CMU’s Next Manufacturing Center that is dedicated to advancing manufacturing especially through 3D printing. He has over 200 peer reviewed publications.
Andrew Slaughter
Computational Scientist, Idaho National Laboratory
Andrew Slaughter began his academic studies focusing on structural engineering while studying at Michigan Technological University (BS) and Washington State University (MS). He shifted focus for a Ph.D. at Montana State University where he studied Applied Engineering Mechanics and researched snow and avalanche physics. This worked included extensive field, laboratory, and computational research and paved the way for him being awarded a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship at Cornell University in 2011, where he focused on developing a phase-tracking snow microstructure model. In 2013, Andrew joined Idaho National Laboratory (INL) and the Multiphysics Object Oriented Simulation Environment (MOOSE; mooseframework.org) team, adding to the wide spectrum of research expertise. Since joining INL, he has worked as a developer and has focused on simulation output, control structure, stochastic analysis, as well as the level set and shallow water physics modules. He also has contributed significantly to the MOOSE-based seismic analysis tool MASTODON and a variety of other projects including enhancing software quality practices and visualization.
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