Congratulations to Abhishek Gupta for becoming the third PhD from our lab. He has successfully defended his thesis on hierarchical materials for traumatic brain injury prevention, and enhanced actuation by engineered damping near exceptional points. He won the Michael Sutton International Student Paper Competition at the Society for Experimental Mechanics in 2023, for his research. He also was recognized with Mentorship Excellence Award from the Undergraduate Research Program of the UW-Madison for his excellent mentorship of undergraduate students in research. He led the Graduate Engineering Mechanics Society as the President this year and conducted the 3-minute thesis competition for the first time. For his services that went beyond expectations, most recently, he received the Graduate Student Service Award from the Graduate School of the UW-Madison. He is heading to the Brown University in Fall as he received the prestigious Hibbitt Engineering Postdoctoral Fellowship there.
In the photo, at the end of his thesis defense, Prof. Thevamaran is handing him a string art illustration of one of his breakthrough experiments: Demonstration of enhanced actuation power by engineered damping near an exceptional point–an unusual and counter intuitive phenomenon resultant from non-Hermitian symmetries. This is the first experimental demonstration of such emissivity enhancement near exceptional points in any framework of physics.
Congratulations, Abhishek. Thank you for all your great work.
