Poster #62 - Nima Rahbar

Associate Professor, Worcester Polytechnic Institute Worcester, Massachusetts, United States

Biography

Dr. Rahbar received his PhD in mechanics, materials and structures from the Department of Civil Engineering at Princeton University in 2008. After four years at University of Massachusetts, he joined WPI in August 2012. His research interests are in the area of bioinspired design of materials with an emphasis on mechanical and thermal. He is currently an associate professor in civil engineering and mechanical engineering at WPI. Less than 10 years from receiving his PhD from Princeton University, Nima Rahbar has accommplished a significant body of work in three major fields in mechanics and materials engineering. In the field of bioinspired design of materials, he has made significant contributions by focusing on inspirations from mechanics of tooth, cartilage, bamboo and nacre. In this field, He has recently focused on inspiration from lipid bilayers on design of active nanoscale thermal diodes. Since the completion of his PhD, he has been working on adhesion and interfacial fracture mechanics where he introduced a method to extract adhesion energies from AFM experiments, and later used molecular dynamics simulations to verify it. Dr. Rahbar has published more than 60 journal papers and won several awards including NSF CAREER award in 2012, TMS Young Leader’s award in 2013, Air Force Summer Faculty Fellowship Award in 2013, Consecutive 2015 and 2016 Outstanding Reviewer, ASCE Journal of Nanomechanics and Micromechanics, and 2018 Sigma Xi Outstanding Junior Faculty Research Award.