I’m a computational mechanician and Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at South Dakota Mines, where I lead the Computational Engineering Analysis and Design (CEAD) Lab.
My research connects mechanics, applied mathematics, and scientific computing to understand complex materials and improve engineering design. I work on functional soft materials, fracture and contact in granular and heterogeneous materials, multiscale modeling, and scientific machine learning. Across these areas, I emphasize estimating and controlling errors in computational predictions.
- MatTO — joint material and topology optimization of stimulus-responsive soft materials.
- PeriDEM — simulation of deformable and breakable particles using peridynamics and contact mechanics.
- Neural operators — operator learning, surrogate modeling, and applications in Bayesian inference.
- NLMech — numerical approximation and parallel simulation of nonlocal models.
I teach mechanics, machine design, and finite element methods. My educational resources connect mathematical foundations with implementation, computational experiments, and verification.
- Finite Element Methods — an evolving open book and graduate course materials.
- FEniCS and FEniCSx tutorials — examples in meshing, PDEs, nonlinear solvers, and elasticity.