Lab studies new ‘living’
engineering material
Sohan Kale
Assistant
Professor
Research
Focus:
Mechanobiol-
ogy of cells and
tissues; Con-
tinuum ther-
momechanics;
Computational
mechanics;
Multiscale
modeling
Advances in bioengineering have led to prom-
ising technologies such as organs-on-chips,
organoids, and bio-robots. These multicellular
engineered living systems are built from cell
and tissues, that are soft, dynamic, and live
out-of-equilibrium. In the recently established
‘Mechanics of Living Materials Lab’, we develop
theoretical models and computational tools to
understand the coupled bio-chemo-mechanics
of this new class of ‘living’ engineering materials.
Dr. Kale’s past work was focused on mechanics
of epithelial tissues. These are cohesive cel-
lular sheets forming protective interfaces in our
bodies. His theoretical modeling efforts, as a
part of a collaborative team of researchers, led to the discovery of a novel behavior of epithelia
termed as ‘active superelasticity’. Analogous to superelastic Nickel-Titanium alloys, these biologi-
cal tissues were shown to undergo extreme reversible deformations at nearly constant tensions.
Current research in his lab is focused on connecting the subcellular mechanics to tissue level
emergent behaviors relevant in physiology and diseases. We aim to use these multiscale compu-
tational frameworks to address fundamental questions in mechanobiology including cell motility,
collective cell motion, tissue morphogenesis and growth. We aspire to use the predictive power
of our computational platforms to control, manipulate, and engineer living materials.
Legged
robots
enable
access to
locations
too
dangerous
for people
Assistant Professor Akbari Hamed’s research aims to develop intelligent,
robust, and safe feedback control algorithms for agile, robust, and dynamic
locomotion of legged robots in real-world environments. More than half
of the Earth’s continent is unreachable to wheeled vehicles - this moti-
vates the deployment of legged robots to enable the accessibility of these
environments and thus bring robots into the real world. His research also
aims to create distributed and decentralized feedback control algorithms
for legged robots that cooperatively work with each other or people to
achieve a variety of tasks in complex environments. The theoretical results
are experimentally evaluated on advanced quadrupedal robots in his lab.
The goal is to advance the control technology in deploying agile robots that
can assist, or stand in for, humans in dangerous situations such as industrial
accidents or natural disasters. This research is supported by NSF.
16 Revised and Corrected, Nov. 2019
Kaveh
Akbari Hamed
Assistant
Professor
Research
Focus:
Control theory;
Robotics;
Cyber-physical
systems, opti-
mization, and
hybrid dynami-
cal systems