About

I’m a Ph.D. student in the Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering at UT Austin, co-advised by Prof. Omar Ghattas and Prof. Mehran Tehrani, and affiliated with the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences. My work is supported by a NASA NSTGRO Fellowship.

I split my time between running experiments in a composites processing lab and developing computational methods at a keyboard — and I love that duality. The physics motivates difficult computational challenges, and the computation reveals things we’d never see in the lab alone.

What I Work On

My research centers on In-Situ Consolidation of Thermoplastic Composites (ICAT) — a high-rate, out-of-autoclave manufacturing process with the potential to dramatically improve both speed and sustainability of large-scale composite production. I’m building the computational and experimental tools to make this technology reliable and certifiable.

This means working across three areas:

Bonding Science — Understanding how thermoplastic laminae fuse together during processing: intimate contact formation, polymer interdiffusion, and crystallization. My first paper investigates resin percolation during intimate contact, which drives the resin-rich interfaces commonly seen in automated fiber placement.

Inverse Problems & Digital Twins — Developing algorithms that infer full-field material properties from indirect measurements. We can’t always see what we need to measure, so we observe displacement or temperature fields and solve an inverse problem to recover spatially-varying modulus, detect voids, and identify non-conformities. Our infinite-dimensional IDIC framework does exactly this.

Experimental Characterization — SEM-DIC, DSC, AFM-IR, micro-CT, ultrasonic C-scan — I believe the best computational models come from researchers who also get their hands dirty in the lab.

Background

I received my B.S. in Aeronautics and Astronautics from Purdue University in 2022, where I worked with Prof. Byron Pipes and Prof. Eduardo Barocio on thermoelastic warpage and additive manufacturing of continuous fiber composites. I was named an Astronaut Scholar for this work.

I’ve completed two R&D internships at Boeing in composite manufacturing, and earlier research stints with Prof. Cate Brinson at Duke (NSF REU) and Prof. Mark Pankow at NC State — where I first discovered composites. Each stop gave me a different lens on how materials, manufacturing, and computation come together.

Beyond the Lab

When I’m not in the lab or writing code, I’m probably outside. I guide trips for Explore Austin, a nonprofit that gets kids outdoors through mountain biking, canoeing, and wilderness skills. I earned my Wilderness First Responder (WFR) after guiding 21-day backpacking trips across Hawaii the summer after graduating from Purdue. It’s a reminder that the best learning — in research and in life — happens when you’re a little outside your comfort zone.

Check out the Adventures page for photos from the trail.