Instructors
Meet our experienced team of instructors.
Lead Instructors
Michael Tonks
Professor and Alumni Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Florida
Michael Tonks is a professor and the Alumni 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. He won the TMS Brimacombe Medal in 2022. 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.
Brandon Wilson
Scientist, Los Alamos National Laboratory
Brandon M. Wilson received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Utah State University. He joined Los Alamos National Laboratory in 2012 as a postdoctoral researcher in experimental fluid dynamics and now contributes to several VVUQ projects as a scientist and leads LANL's VVUQ group consisting of scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and statisticians. During his career at LANL, Brandon has acquired a diverse background, having been part of experimental, engineering, and computational physics organizations. He has been involved with Richtmyer-Meshkov measurements on the vertical shock tube, engineering analysis, development of the high-energy-density physics validation suite, and uncertainty quantification (UQ) of materials aging/self-irradiation effects. Wilson has brought his broad experience to bear on the development and application of UQ methods for experimental facilities, diagnostics, engineering systems, and complex physical processes. His research interests include development of validation, UQ, multi-fidelity modeling methods, and leveraging VVUQ for design of better experiments.
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.
Zachary Harris
Research Scientist, University of Virginia
Zachary Harris is a research scientist in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Virginia, who will be joining the Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science Department at the University of Pittsburgh as an assistant professor in the fall of 2022. His research is centered on understanding how aggressive environments affect the fatigue, fracture, and mechanical behavior of structural materials by coupling state-of-the-art characterization techniques with high-fidelity mechanical testing. Harris received his Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of Virginia in 2018, where he studied heat treatment effects on hydrogen environment-assisted cracking of a Ni-Cu superalloy commonly employed in marine environments. He has been recognized as an Emerging Professional by ASTM International, featured in JOM's Young Professional series, and is internationally regarded for his expertise in hydrogen-assisted cracking of structural metals.
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.
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.
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