Accomplishments: Department of Mechanical Engineering

December 14, 2022
Assistant professor H. Jeremy Cho (Mechanical Engineering) has received the NSF CAREER award for his project, "Continuous atmospheric water harvesting through gels." This award for $596,487 will support research on atmospheric water harvesting for five years through a UNLV-developed hydrogel membrane design. Atmospheric water harvesting is a way…
November 7, 2022
Justin Neubauer (Mechanical Engineering), published a paper titled, "Tunable polyvinyl chloride (PVC) and thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU)-based soft polymer gel sensors," in Smart Materials and Structures.
October 31, 2022
Jeremy Cho (Mechanical Engineering), along with doctoral student Mario Mata, master's student Brandon Ortiz, and undergraduate students Dhruv Luhar and Vesper Evereux, published a paper titled, "How dynamic adsorption controls surfactant-enhanced boiling," in Scientific Reports. The work breaks conventional wisdom on how surfactants can be used…
October 31, 2022
Charlotta E. Sanders (Mechanical Engineering) and Mark Callis Sanders’ paper titled, "Three Blind Mice — Low-dose Radiation, Epidemiology and the Law,” was presented at the International Nuclear Law Association’s (INLA) 2022 Nuclear Inter Jura by Mark Sanders. The meeting was held at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C., on October 24-28, 2022,…
October 28, 2022
Jeremy Cho (Mechanical Engineering) was awarded the American Chemical Society (ACS) Petroleum Research Fund Doctoral New Investigator grant. The two-year, $110,000 grant will support fundamental research in understanding how surfactants can be used to mobilize oil trapped in water. The research is applicable to the petroleum field and groundwater…
October 24, 2022
Alexander Barzilov (Mechanical Engineering) and Zaijing Sun (Health Physics and Diagnostic Sciences) gave recruitment presentations and answered questions about the nuclear engineering and health physics programs at the 2022 American Nuclear Society Virtual Graduate School Fair last week. UNLV was among 25 universities invited to have recruitment…
October 10, 2022
Jeremy Cho (Mechanical Engineering), along with doctoral student Yiwei Gao, authored a paper published in Soft Matter. The paper is titled, "Quantifying the trade-off between stiffness and permeability in hydrogels." The paper is also featured in the Soft Matter Emerging Investigators Series. Hydrogels—polymeric gel materials used in contact…
September 14, 2022
Seungman Park (Mechanical Engineering) received the prestigious NIH Career Award (NIA K25 Mentored Quantitative Research Career Development Award). This five-year grant supports Park’s ongoing research to investigate the relation between tissue viscoelasticity and tumor progression in aging tissues. Park is currently an assistant professor in the…
August 19, 2022
Zachary Frank, a UNLV alumnus, and Kwang Kim (Mechanical Engineering) published "On the mechanism of performance improvement of electroactive polyvinyl chloride (PVC) gel actuators via conductive fillers" in Scientific Reports.
August 15, 2022
Alexandrea Washington (Mechanical Engineering), with Zakai Olsen, Ji Su, and Kwang Kim (Mechanical Engineering), published "A physics-based modeling of a hydraulically amplified electrostatic actuator," in the Journal of Physics Communications. 
April 30, 2022
Kwang Kim (Mechanical Engineering) and Dong-Chan Lee (Chemistry) are inventors of a patent, Fabricating Ionic/Polyimide Membranes with its issue number, US 11,312,851, recently granted by the , the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.   
March 8, 2022
Rubaiya Murshed and Shubhra Bansal (both Mechanical Engineering) have published a journal paper on Perovskite photovoltaic material, "Additive-Assisted Optimization in Morphology and Optoelectronic Properties of Inorganic Mixed Sn-Pb Halide Perovskites." This paper was published in Materials in  January. Murshed is a doctoral student.