The state Board of Regents have approved the advancement of mechanical engineering’s Soumik Sarkar to full professor, while faculty members Sarah Bentil, Jaime Juarez and Beiwen Li will receive tenure and promotion to the rank of associate professor.
Professor
Soumik Sarkar is a Walter W. Wilson Faculty Fellow in Engineering and director of the Translational AI Center at Iowa State University. His research interests include machine learning, decision & control, and cyber-physical systems. He earned his B.E. in Mechanical Engineering from Jadavpur University, as well as his M.A. in Mathematics, M.S. in Mechanical Engineering and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering all from Penn State University.
Tenure + Associate Professor
Sarah Bentil is a Building a World of Difference Faculty Fellow in Engineering and received the Early Achievement in Research Award from Iowa State University’s College of Engineering in 2022. Her research interests include soft tissue biomechanics, biomaterials, traumatic brain injuries, blast impact injury mechanisms, high-speed imaging, brain-machine interfaces and blunt impact injury mechanisms. She earned her B.S. in both Mechanical Engineering and Mathematics from the University of Vermont, her M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Hawaii and her Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from The Ohio State University.
Jaime Juarez began his career at Iowa State University in 2015 and was named the McNair Faculty Mentor of the Year in 2021. His research interests include microfabrication, microscopy, microfluidics, flow cytometry, soft matter physics, self-assembly of materials, physics of micro- and nanoscale forces, simulation of colloidal materials, as well as additive manufacturing (3D printing) of polymers and composites. He earned his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University, his M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Texas-San Antonio, and his Ph.D. in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from Johns Hopkins University.
Beiwen Li was awarded the William and Virginia Binger Professorship of Mechanical Engineering from Iowa State University and is the director of the High-Dimensional Optical Sensing Lab. His research interests include superfast 3D optical sensing, multi-scale 3D optical metrology, 3D shape analysis, machine/computer vision, and in-situ monitoring and inspection. He earned his B.S. in Optoelectronics from Beijing University, his M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Iowa State University and his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Purdue University. Several of his research works have been highlighted on the cover page of prestigious journals including Optics Express, Applied Optics and Geotechnique Letters. He was the recipient of 2020 SPIE Defense and Commercial Sensing Rising Researcher Award and was recognized as one of Emerging Leaders 2021 by the journal of Measurement Science and Technology.