About Me
Mahnoush Babaei
Research Associate\Lecturer
mahnoushb at utexas dot edu
I am a research associate/lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin. My research lies in the intersection of computational mechanics, bioinspired designs, and small-scale robotics. I am currently part of a Multidisciplinary Research Initiative (MURI), where I collaborate with research groups at the University of Washington to (1) understand the dynamics of a flapping wing of a Hawkmoth and its mechanosensory structure, and (2) design a bioinspired sensor for agile flight in UAVs. I received my Ph.D. in Computational Mechanics from Carnegie Mellon University, where I received the Jo and Neil Bushnell Fellowship Award for outstanding graduate students from the College of Engineering in 2016, and the Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award from the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department in 2018.
News
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In the Spring 2022 semester, I will be teaching the undergraduate course, Mechanics of Solids (EM319) at The University of Texas at Austin.
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In January 2022, I presented my work "Nonuniform stiffness of insect wings enhances sensing performance" at SICB annual meeting.
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Glad to be part of an amazing team working on the "Morphing Pasta and Beyond" paper. Check out our paper published in Science Advances and featured in the New York Times and ABC News (May 2021).
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Our recent work on amplified actuation of photoresponsive polymers is featured in Swanson Pitt News, "Origami Powered by Light" (Feb 2021).
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Our paper "Torque-Dense Photomechanical Actuation" is to be published in Soft Matter (Nov 2020).
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"Babaei Identifies Lipid Rafts as Way COVID-19 Invades Cells", features our recent publication on mechanobiology of lipid rafts across cell membranes (Oct 2020).
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Our 2020 CEE Rising Stars Workshop kicks off on Monday, October 5th and I will chair the first session (Oct 2020).
