Events Calendar

PRESENTATION: PhDs Beyond Academia – From private engineering consulting to biomechanics and robotics, join us for a conversation with engineering PhDs working outside academia in a variety of industries. 

This is a virtual event. Please email ME-dept@uiowa.edu to request the Zoom meeting link. 

PANELISTS:  Esteban Castro-Feliciano, PhD (Crown Hydrodynamics), Rand Hidayah, PhD (Viam, Inc.) and Luis Nolasco, PhD (Explico)

Dr. Esteban L. Castro is the principal at Crown Hydrodynamics. He uses his experience in control system design and marine dynamics to explore new perspectives and solutions in the design of marine vehicles and structures. His research interests include vessel performance augmentation with active control systems, marine dynamics, vessel geometry optimization, shock evaluation and mitigation, nature-inspired behaviors and design for marine vehicles, and prototyping techniques for vessel geometry. Dr. Castro attended the Webb Institute for his BS in naval architecture and marine engineering (NAME) and the University of Michigan for his PhD and MSE in NAME, and MSE in Electrical Engineering-Systems. 

Dr. Rand Hidayah is a Robotics Engineer at Viam. Her research was in wearable robotics for the rehabilitation of movement, focusing on designing lower-limb wearable, cable-driven robots for post-stroke functional movements. She now works as a team lead at Viam, where she is responsible for the technical direction of the teams interfacing with hardware and designing the interfaces for users of the Viam platform to interact with actuators and sensors. Dr. Hidayah attended M.I.T and Columbia University, where she received her SB and PhD degrees, respectively.

Dr. Luis Nolasco, a Senior Scientist at Explico, utilizes a variety of methodologies to support the Biomechanics team in forensic investigations of musculoskeletal injuries. These methodologies include physical testing, computational simulations, and human subject testing. He is also involved in the research efforts at Explico currently focusing on validating crash test data with computational simulations. Dr. Nolasco holds a BS in Biomedical Engineering from Wichita State University and an MS and PhD in Movement Science from the University of Michigan. He has published peer-reviewed journal articles and abstracts in the clinical biomechanics and injury biomechanics fields.

FACULTY HOST: Dr. Deema Totah, Mechanical Engineering Graduate Seminar, Mechanical Engineering Department, University of Iowa