Dr. Cherukuri Appointed Chair of Mechanical Engineering

The William States Lee College of Engineering is proud to announce the appointment of Dr. Harish Cherukuri as the Chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Engineering Science (MEES).

Dr. Cherukuri earned his Ph.D. in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign in 1994. His doctoral focus was on the numerical simulations of shear flow localization in viscoplastic materials and wave propagation in elastic solids. He was a postdoctoral research associate at UNC Charlotte for two years starting in 1995. During this period, his work focused on the development of online models for casting and rolling using asymptotic methods.

Dr. Cherukuri became a member of the MEES faculty in 1997. Since then he has worked on various collaborative research projects sponsored by the federal funding agencies and industry. His most recent research interests are in the application of Machine Learning techniques to manufacturing and materials behavior. As an educator, Dr. Cherukuri teaches courses in solid mechanics and computational methods. Having served the MEES department as the graduate coordinator for over eight years and as the interim chair in 2011-2012, he has extensive experience as an administrator.

Dr. Cherukuri was Fulbright-Nehru Senior Research Fellow to India in 2010-2011 and the Harshini V. de Silva Graduate Mentor award winner in 2011. He is a member of the ASME and SIAM. He served as the vice-chair and the chair of the ASME-AMD Technical Committee on Materials Processing and Manufacturing for several years.