DESIGN AUTOMATION

Pingfeng Wang

Pingfeng Wang is an Associate Professor in the Department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), and the director of the Reliability Analysis and Safety Assurance (RASA) lab at Illinois. He received his B.S. in 2001 in Mechanical Engineering from University of Science and Technology in Beijing, his M.S. in 2006 in Applied Math from Tsinghua University, and his Ph.D. in 2010 in Mechanical Engineering from University of Maryland. Dr. Wang’s research has been focused on developing new design methods and tools to improve reliability, safety and failure resilience of engineered systems. He is the recipient of the NSF CAREER award (2014), the Young Researcher Award from International Society of Green Manufacturing and Applications (2012), the ASME Design Automation Young Investigator Award (2016), and Best Paper Awards in the ASME Design Automation Conferences (2008 and 2013).

Xiaoping Qian

Xiaoping Qian is a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and his MS and BS from the Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China, all in mechanical engineering. He is an elected ASME Fellow. He has served as an associate editor for ASME Journal of Manufacturing Science and Engineering and ASME Journal of Computing and Information Science in Engineering as well as in the editorial board of the journal Computer-Aided Design.

Jitesh H. Panchal

Dr. Jitesh H. Panchal is an Associate Professor in the School of Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University. He received his BTech (2000) from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Guwahati, and MS (2003) and Ph.D. (2005) in Mechanical Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology. Dr. Panchal’s research interests are in the computational design of complex engineering systems with a focus on three areas a) decision making in engineering systems design, b) collective innovation, and c) cyber-physical systems for design and manufacturing. He is a co-author of the book titled “Integrated Design of Multiscale, Multifunctional Materials, and Products”. He is a recipient of CAREER award from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Young Engineer Award and three best paper awards from the ASME International Design Engineering Technical Conferences (IDETC) and Computers and Information in Engineering (CIE) conference, and a university silver medal from IIT Guwahati.

Julián Norato

Dr. Norato is currently an Associate Professor in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Connecticut, which he joined in 2014. He holds M.Sc. (2003) and Ph.D. (2005) degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia (1997). Prior to joining UConn, he worked for and led the Product Optimization group at Caterpillar, where he and his team researched numerical methods and developed computational tools for structural and multidisciplinary optimization. Dr. Norato led the development of Caterpillar’s in-house topology optimization code, as well as the development of a method and tool for optimization of welding sequences to reduce weld-induced distortion, for which he and his collaborators received Caterpillar’s Move the Mountain Award in 2014. His current research interests lie in incorporating failure, geometric, manufacturing and cost requirements in computational topology and shape optimization techniques for the design exploration of novel and highly efficient structures and architected materials. Dr. Norato is a 2020 Air Force Research Lab Summer Fellow, the recipient of the 2019 ASME Design Automation Young Investigator Award, a 2018 NSF CAREER awardee and a recipient of the 2017 Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Program award.