Four new members have joined DRSL. Welcome Giwan, Peng, Vaibhavi, and Raj!

Giwan and Vaibhavi have just started their Ph.D. program, Raj is an incoming Postdoctoral Researcher, and Peng is a visiting student from Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China

Giwan Noh

Current Program: Ph.D. in Civil Engineering
Email: [email protected]

Giwan earned his B.S. (Magna Cum Laude) in Architectural Engineering from Pusan National University, Busan, South Korea, and his M.S. in Architecture and Architectural Engineering from Seoul National University, Seoul, South Korea. His previous research focused on structural mechanics and concrete technologies, and currently his research lies in the design and utilization of thick origami.

Vaibhavi Chidella

Current Program: Ph.D. in Civil Engineering
Email: [email protected]

Vaibhavi earned her Bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Roorkee, India. During her undergraduate studies, her research focused on construction materials, particularly Fiber-Reinforced Concrete (FRC) and Engineered Cementitious Composites (ECC).

Her current research focuses on the mechanics of mycelium hybrid systems, aiming to enhance performance of biomaterials.

Raj Pradip Khawale

Postdoctoral Researcher,
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Department of Mechanical Engineering
Email: [email protected]

Raj earned his Ph.D. in Automotive Engineering from Clemson University in 2024, where he developed computational frameworks for the design and analysis of metamaterials using tiling operations and complementary energy principles. He completed his Master’s degree in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University at Buffalo in 2019, where he built an end-to-end computational pipeline for FEM-based analysis of periodic structures using the MFEM library. He obtained his Bachelor of Technology in Mechanical Engineering from SRM University in 2017. His current work focuses on developing computational tools for deployable structures.

Peng Tang

Visiting Ph.D. student from Zhejiang University
Email: [email protected]

Peng Tang received his B.E. degree in Electronic Information Engineering from Sichuan University, Chengdu, China, in 2021. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. with the College of Information Science and Electronic Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China. He applied for a one-year exchange program at the University of Michigan, running from August 2024 to July 2025. His research interests include deformable electromagnetic media, antennas, and nanophotonics.