The Mechanosynthesis Group gives a warm welcome to five new members this semester: Crystal Owens, Dhanush Mariappan, Emily Hanhauser, Kehang Cui, Piran Kidambi, and Mike Bono.

Crystal Owens is a masters student focusing on precision microfluidics using non-traditional building-block components. She previously received her B.S.E. in Mechanical Engineering from Duke University in 2015.

Dhanush Mariappan is a Ph.D. candidate in Mechanical Engineering. He is working on high speed micro contact printing with CNT stamps, high speed electrostatic printing of 2d materials, and roll to roll graphene manufacturing process development. Before joining Mechanosyntheis group at MIT, he was a Visiting Research Investigator at the Precision Systems Design Laboratory at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He earned his master’s degree in mechanical engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a Presidential Fellow in 2003 and his Bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras in 2001. He cofounded TechPassion and led the development and commercialization of VMAP, a modal testing and FEA-test correlation software that is now used in automotive, aerospace and other industries. Before TechPassion, he was a Research Engineer at General Electric Global Research Physical Sciences Laboratory working on new product development programs for healthcare, transportation and industrial systems businesses. While at GE, he completed the Six Sigma Green Belt and Foundations of Leadership certification. He is an engineer with over ten years of experience in mechanical design, electromechanical systems, computer graphics, sensors, signal processing, data acquisition, and software development. He is a member of the NAFEMS India Education and Training working group. He was an invited participant at the Indo US Frontiers of Engineering Symposium held at Irvine, California in 2008. He is also the reviewer of the Experimental Techniques Journal.

Emily Hanhauser is a masters student working on low-cost water diagnosis in collaboration with J-WAFS (The Abdul Latif Jameel World Water and Food Security Lab). She previously received her B.S. in Biology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2012. Between her undergraduate work and now, Emily was a Staff Research Associate II at the University of California, San Francisco and also a Technical Research Assistant I & II at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Kehang Cui is a postdoctoral researcher at The Unviersity of Tokyo after previously completing his doctoral researcher there as well. As part of Mechanosynthesis, he will be studying the synthesis and self-assembly of carbon nanotubes.

Piran Kidambi is a postdoctoral associate focusing on new concepts for scalable manufacturing of 2D materials. His research interests are in the synthesis and application of nano-structured materials in a joint appointment with the Microfluidics and Nanofluidics Lab of Prof. Rohit Karnik at MIT. He has a B.Tech from the National Institute of Technology at Tiruchirappalli in 2006, M.S. from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich in 2010, and Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 2014 (advisor Dr. Stephan Hofmann).

Mike Bono is a postdoctoral associate working on soil and water diagnosis in collaboration with the Tata Center and Rohit Karnik’s Microfluidics and Nanofluidics Group. His previous doctoral work at Cornell University was on dielectric measurement of algal lipid content for biodiesel production. He also received his Masters degree from Cornell University.