New Faculty Moore Scholar Aaron D

WHO’S NEW WHO’S NEW New Faculty Moore Scholar Aaron D. Ames Lihong Wang The Moore Distinguished Scholar program was estab- Bren Professor of Mechanical and Civil Engineering Bren Professor of Medical lished by Gordon and Betty Moore to invite researchers Engineering and Electrical of exceptional quality who are distinguished at both the Aaron Ames develops fundamental theory bridging the areas of robotics, nonlinear control, Engineering national and international levels to visit the California and hybrid systems, with a heavy emphasis on applications to bipedal robotic walking—both Institute of Technology for three to six months. There formally and through experimental validation. His lab designs, builds, and tests novel bipedal Lihong Wang’s primary are no teaching or other obligations during the appoint- robots, humanoids, and prostheses with the goal of achieving human-like bipedal robotic research interest is in ment, allowing Moore Scholars to focus on research. locomotion and translating these capabilities to robotic assistive devices. The application the development of of these ideas range from increased autonomy in legged robots to improved locomotion capa- novel biomedical imag- Petros Koumoutsakos bilities in the mobility impaired. ing technologies. His Chair for Computational Science, He received a BS in mechanical engineering and a BA in mathematics from the University of St. Thomas laboratory was the first to report functional ETH Zurich and his MA in mathematics and PhD in electrical engineering and computer sciences from UC Berkeley. He photoacoustic tomography, 3-D photoacous- was a postdoctoral scholar in control and dynamical systems at Caltech and then began his faculty career at Texas tic microscopy, photoacoustic endoscopy, Petros Koumoutsakos conducts A&M University. Prior to returning to Caltech as Bren Professor, he was at the Georgia Institute of Technology photoacoustic reporter gene imaging, the research at the interface of simulation as an associate professor in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the School of Electrical and photoacoustic Doppler effect, the universal and data sciences with an emphasis Computer Engineering. photoacoustic reconstruction algorithm, mi- on fundamentals and applications crowave-induced thermoacoustic tomography, in the areas of fluid mechanics, life ultrasound-modulated optical tomography, sciences, and nanotechnology. time-reversed ultrasonically encoded optical To learn more about our new faculty’s research and He received his diploma from the National Technical Andrew M. Stuart focusing, nonlinear photoacoustic wavefront accomplishments, visit eas.caltech.edu/people. University of Athens, Greece, and his first MS from the Bren Professor of Computing and shaping, compressed ultrafast photography University of Michigan in naval architecture. He also Mathematical Sciences (100 billion frames/second), Mueller-matrix received an MS and PhD in aeronautics and applied optical coherence tomography, and optical mathematics from Caltech. He joined ETH Zurich as Soon-Jo Chung Andrew Stuart’s research is coherence computed tomography. Assistant Professor of Computational Fluid Dynamics Associate Professor of Aerospace in applied and computational He obtained his BS and MS from and was then named Professor of Computational mathematics—in particular, in the Huazhong University of Science & Science. Later, he became the founding director of the Soon-Jo Chung’s research the analysis and development Technology in Wuhan, China, and his PhD ETH Zurich Computational Laboratory and the Zurich focuses on nonlinear control of effective algorithms and from Rice University. Prior to joining the Graduate School for Computational Science. In addition and estimation theory as well the creation of mathematical Caltech faculty, he held the Gene K. Beare to being a Caltech Moore Scholar, he is a fellow of the as motion planning and flight frameworks within which to further the analysis Distinguished Professorship of Biomedical Collegium Helveticum and of the Radcliffe Institute at control, with application to and development of those algorithms. His current Engineering at Washington University in Harvard University. spaceborne interferometry, research focus is on the interfacing of mathematical St. Louis. spacecraft swarms, and robotic models with data, and more specifically the solution spacecraft systems. Other areas of research include of inverse problems and data assimilation. He has aerial robotics, bioinspired flight, and vision-based developed foundational mathematical frameworks navigation. At Caltech, he is establishing a research for the formulation of statistical inverse problems, Michael M. Watkins and education program in distributed spacecraft where both model and data are uncertain, and for Professor of Aerospace and Geophysics; Vice President and Director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory systems and aerospace autonomous systems. filtering of high-dimensional systems; guiding ap- He received his BS in aerospace engineering plications for this work include subsurface geophys- Before being appointed as the JPL director, Dr. Watkins was the Clare Cockrell Williams from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and ics and atmospheric modeling. Centennial Chair in Aerospace Engineering and Director of the Center for Space Research Technology (KAIST). He then went to the He graduated in mathematics from Bristol at the University of Texas at Austin. Prior to his time at the University of Texas, he worked Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to University and then obtained his PhD from the at JPL for 22 years. He served as mission manager and mission system manager for the Mars earn his MS in aeronautics and astronautics and Oxford University Computing Laboratory. After a Science Laboratory’s Curiosity rover, led review and development teams for several missions, ScD in estimation and control with a minor in postdoctoral appointment in mathematics at MIT, including the Cassini, Mars Odyssey, and Deep Impact probes, and was the project scientist optics. Prior to joining Caltech, he was on the he held permanent positions at Bath University leading science development for the GRAIL moon-mapping satellites, the GRACE Earth faculty at Iowa State University and the University in mathematics and at Stanford University in the science mission, and the GRACE Follow-On mission. He also served as manager of the JPL Science Division of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has a strong computer science and mechanical engineering and the chief scientist for the Engineering and Science Directorate. He holds a BS, MS, and PhD in aerospace collaboration with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on departments before joining the Warwick University engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. distributed small satellites. Mathematics Institute. 6 division of engineering & applied science ENGenious ISSUE 13, 2016 7.

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