Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Washington in Seattle, USA

Dr. Steven L. Brunton is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Washington. He is also Adjunct Professor of Applied Mathematics, Aeronautics and astronautics, and Computer science, and he is also a Data Science Fellow at the eScience Institute. He is Director of the AI Center for Dynamics and Control (ACDC) at UW and is Director for the NSF AI Institute in Dynamic Systems. Steve received the B.S. in mathematics from Caltech in 2006 and the Ph.D. in mechanical and aerospace engineering from Princeton in 2012. His research combines machine learning with dynamical systems to model and control systems in fluid dynamics, biolocomotion, optics, energy systems, and manufacturing. He received the Army and Air Force Young Investigator Program (YIP) awards and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). Steve is also passionate about teaching math to engineers as co-author of four textbooks and through his popular YouTube channel, under the moniker “eigensteve”.

Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA

Dr. Pavana Prabhakar is the Charles G. Salmon Associate Professor in Mechanical Engineering and Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she leads the Manufacturing and Mechanics Lab (MaMeL). She received her PhD in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 2013, an MS in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 2007, and a BTech in Civil Engineering from the National Institute of Technology Karnataka, India. Her research interests are in mechanics and advanced manufacturing of architected composite materials, with an emphasis on damage and failure in multi-physics environments. Prabhakar has received numerous awards, including a Fulbright U.S. Scholarship, NSF CAREER Award, the ONR Young Investigator Program (ONR-YIP) Award, and the AFOSR Young Investigator Program (AFOSR-YIP) Award. She also received the 2019 American Society for Composites Young Composites Researcher Award. She is an Associate Editor for Composites Part B: Engineering and serves on the Editorial Board of Composites Science and Technology journals. For more information, see the Prabhakar Research Group website.