People

Principal Investigator

Hussein Aluie, PhD

Associate Professor & Staff Scientist

Department of Mechanical Engineering & Laboratory for Laser Energetics

Link to CV

Hopeman 406

husseinrochester.edu

office: (585) 276-7170

fax: (585) 275-4072

▾ show bio-sketch ▾

Hussein is an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Hajim School of Engineering at the University of Rochester (UofR) and Staff Scientist at the DOE Laboratory for Laser Energetics. He is currently serving as chair-elect of the Group on the Physics of Climate (GPC) within the American Physical Society (APS). Prior to UofR, he was at Los Alamos National Laboratory as a Center for Nonlinear Studies postdoc. He earned his PhD from the Johns Hopkins University under the mentorship of Gregory Eyink, Charles Meneveau, Shiyi Chen, and Ethan Vishniac. He was awarded the DOE Early CAREER Award in 2019 and selected in 2022 as one of two Young Observers by USNCTAM, which represents the mechanics community on behalf of the US National Academies. His Complex Flow group is diverse both in the composition of its members and in its research, which has appeared in cross-disciplinary journals, including Nature, Science Advances, Physical Review Letters, as well as in disciplinary journals spanning fluid mechanics, oceanography, plasma physics, applied mathematics, and astrophysics. Hussein enjoys outdoor sports, live music, and swing dancing.

Visiting Scholars

Michele Buzzicotti, PhD

Visiting Scholar

Department of Mechanical Engineering

Link to CV

Hopeman 410

mbuzzicome.rochester.edu

▾ show bio-sketch ▾

Michele is a visiting scholar in MechE at UofR during 2020, working on turbulence and machine learning. He obtained his PhD in theoretical physics in 2017 at the University of Rome Tor Vergata, where he has an appointment as a Researcher. His main research activity is in the study of turbulent flows using numerical simulations. Working from both Eulerian and Lagrangian points of view, he is interested in the development of non-linear, out of equilibrium models, such as Large-Eddy-Simulation closures for the small-scale dynamics of high Reynolds or magnetohydrodynamic flows. He is responsible for the development of High-Performance Computing (HPC) codes for state-of-the-art Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS), which are typically run on supercomputers and scale up to tens of thousands of processing cores. He is also involved in the application and development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools to fluid flow problems such as: deep learning for the data analysis of turbulent flows and reinforcement learning/policy gradient methods for the development of smart vehicles which are able to solve optimal navigation tasks in complex environments.

Research Scientists

Fernando Garcia Rubio, PhD

Assistant Scientist

Laboratory for Laser Energetics

Link to CV

250 E River Rd

fgarlle.rochester.edu

▾ show bio-sketch ▾

Fernando García Rubio earned his Ph. D. from the Polytechnic University of Madrid (UPM), School of Aerospace Engineering, Spain under the supervision of Professor Francisco Javier Sanz Recio. He then joined the University of Rochester as Postdoctoral Research Associate from 2018 until 2021, when he was promoted to Assistant Scientist at the LLE. During his tenure at UofR, Fernando developed a theory for hydrodynamic instabilities that includes the physics of magnetic fields and heat transport. During his PhD, he focused on understanding of several hydrodynamic processes taking place in magnetized liner inertial fusion (MagLIF) schemes. Fernando is originally from Logroño, Spain. He received a Double Degree in Aerospace Engineering at the UPM and Supaéro-ISAE in Toulouse (France). He received his master in Applied Mathematics at Paul Sabatier University, Toulouse. His research interests lie in the broad spectrum of plasma physics, with focus on magneto-hydrodynamics processes, hydrodynamic instabilities and kinetic theory. During his free time, Fernando enjoys basketball, climbing, skiing, and playing the guitar.

Benjamin Storer, PhD

Research Associate

Department of Mechanical Engineering

Link to CV

Hopeman 410

benjamin.storerrochester.edu

▾ show bio-sketch ▾

Benjamin Storer is a researcher associate at the University of Rochester studying multi-scale physics in oceanographic processes and the mechanisms by which energy is transferred across scales in the world's oceans. He earned a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics at the University of Waterloo, Canada, where he studied geophysical fluid dynamics under Francis Poulin, with a focus on model development and application to stratified quasi-geostrophic systems. He then joined the University of Rochester as Postdoctoral Research Associate from 2019 until 2022, when he was promoted to Research Associate in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. His work is primarily in computational fluid dynamics, with a focus on geophysical and oceanographic applications. In his spare time, he likes reading, running, yoga, and is a devout Star Trek fan.

Postdocs

Pejman Sichani, PhD

Postdoctoral Research Associate

Mechanical Engineering Department

Link to CV

Hopeman 410

pejman.sichanirochester.edu

▾ show bio-sketch ▾

Pejman Hadi Sichani joined the University of Rochester in July 2022 as a Postdoctoral Associate. He earned his master's and a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Vienna University of Technology, Austria, where he investigated the interaction of thermal and solutal stratification with turbulence in wall-bounded flows using Direct Numerical Simulations (DNS) under Prof. Alfredo Soldati. The main emphasis of his research during his Ph.D. was DNS of thermally-stratified wall-bounded turbulence to investigate the dynamics of internal gravity waves, energetics, and irreversible mixing in stably-stratified turbulence. In addition, he studied the problem of Double Diffusive Convection (DDC) under the effect of shear using fully resolved numerical simulations. His main research interests are computational fluid dynamics, environmental and geophysical fluid dynamics, and high-performance computing. In his spare time, he enjoys hiking, swimming, and reading. Pejman's favorite scientist of all time is Carl Friedrich Gauss.

Graduate Students

Nitish Acharya

PhD Student (co-advised w/ Jessica Shang)

Department of Mechanical Engineering

Link to Website

Hopeman 410

nachary2ur.rochester.edu

▾ show bio-sketch ▾

Nitish was born and raised in Kathmandu, Nepal. He is currently a Ph.D. Student in Mechanical University at University of Rochester. He received a B.E. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Tribhuvan University. His research interests are in the areas of experimental and computational fluid dynamics. Outside of work, Nitish enjoys playing or listening to music, soccer, and tennis.

Mehrnoush Kharghani

PhD Student

Department of Mechanical Engineering

Link to Website

Hopeman 410

mkharghaur.rochester.edu

▾ show bio-sketch ▾

Mehrnoush began her PhD studies in Mechanical Engineering student at the University of Rochester in 2022. Prior to joining UofR, Mehrnoush completed her bachelor's and master's degrees in Iran where she conducted research in environmental boundary layer flows, culminating in two first author papers and a third paper as co-author. She is interested in understanding environmental flows using tools from CFD and turbulence. In her leisure time, Mehrnoush likes to do yoga, play tennis with friends, and watch movies.

Kelin Kurzer-Ogul

PhD Student (co-advised w/ Jessica Shang)

Department of Mechanical Engineering

Link to Website

Hopeman 410

kkurzerour.rochester.edu

▾ show bio-sketch ▾

Kelin began studying plasma physics as a Mechanical Engineering PhD student at the University of Rochester in September 2020, following a year of study as a Master's student. He received his B.S. in astrophysics at the University of California Santa Cruz, where he conducted computational research on the gasdynamics of active galactic nuclei. Before graduate school, he worked with children at the elementary school in his home town of Kensington, California for two years. Kelin's current work is in computational HED fluid dynamics, and his research interests inculde astrophysical jets, plasma instabilities in inertial confinement fusion, and laser wakefield acceleration. Outside of academia, Kelin enjoys skiing, history, fantasy/sci-fi, and video games.

Shikhar Rai

PhD Student

Department of Mechanical Engineering

Link to Website

Hopeman 410

srai6ur.rochester.edu

▾ show bio-sketch ▾

I did my undergraduate in Mechanical Engineering from Tribhuvan University, Nepal. I worked for two and a half years in Nepal and Japan with E&T Nepal in Bhaktapur, Nepal, E&T Japan in Utsunomia, Japan and Chiyoda Corporation in Yokohama, Japan as a CFD Engineer. My research interest are fluid mechanics, CFD, and numerical methods. Some of my hobbies are sketching, painting, watching movies and anime.

Shailendra Rana

PhD Student

Department of Mechanical Engineering

Link to Website

Hopeman 410

srana4ur.rochester.edu

▾ show bio-sketch ▾

Shailendra earned his Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering in 2015 from Tribhuvan University, Nepal. He worked as a Lecturer for three and a half years at different engineering institutions in Nepal where he taught various engineering courses at an undergraduate level. Then he earned his Master’s degree in Mechanical Systems Design and Engineering from Pulchowk Campus, Tribhuvan University, Nepal in 2020 with a research focus on incompressible magnetohydrodynamic flows. In his Master’s studies, he investigated the influence of magnetic field on vortex shedding around an unconfined triangular cylinder at low Reynolds and Hartmann numbers, culminating into two first-authored papers. After obtaining his Master’s degree, he studied passive heat transfer enhancement techniques with applications to electronics cooling. In that, he investigated the effects of mono/hybrid nanofluids and baffles on thermal performance in backward-facing step channels using CFD, resulting in three major first-authored papers. His research focus includes CFD, oceanic flows and turbulence. In his leisure time, he enjoys watching movies and football, hiking, and occasionally playing cricket and football. Besides this, he is keen on photography.

Abdus Samad

PhD Student

Department of Mechanical Engineering

Link to Website

Hopeman 410

asamad3ur.rochester.edu

▾ show bio-sketch ▾

Abdus was born and raised in Roorkee, India. He received his bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering from AMU Aligarh, India and master's degree in Mechanical Engineering from IIT Kanpur, India where he worked on particle laden turbulent flows. He is interested in CFD, turbulence, astrophysical and oceanic flows. In his leisure time, he likes to cook, read and travel with friends.

Dina Soltani

PhD Student

Department of Mechanical Engineering

Link to Website

Hopeman 410

dsoltaniur.rochester.edu

▾ show bio-sketch ▾

Dina was a researcher at the Amirkabir University of Technology in Tehran, Iran, where she investigated the electrohydrodynamic behavior of low-frequency plasmonic regions under the supervision of Amir Nader Askarpour and Sahar Noori, with a focus on model development and application to dielectric barrier discharge actuators, resulting in two first-author papers. She earned a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering with a concentration in Fields and Waves and a Bachelor of Science in Aerospace Engineering with a concentration in Fluid Dynamics. Prior to enrolling at the University of Rochester, she worked as a research intern at the Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran, Iran, where she contributed to the study of the astrophysical hydrodynamic simulation of IllustrisTNG, utilizing cutting-edge Topological Data Analysis tools. Her areas of interest in research include electrohydrodynamics, hydrodynamics in astrophysical systems, and turbulence. Dina is an amateur astronomer who enjoys observing the night sky and capturing astronomical objects with her own telescope.

Afreen Syeda

PhD Student (co-advised w/ Jessica Shang)

Department of Mechanical Engineering

Link to Website

Hopeman 410

asyeda2ur.rochester.edu

▾ show bio-sketch ▾

Afreen is a Mechanical Engineering PhD student at the University of Rochester, starting in the fall of 2019. She was born and raised in Hyderabad, India. She received her bachelor’s degree in Aeronautical Engineering from JNTU Hyderabad, India and master’s degree in Aerospace Engineering from IIT Kanpur, India. Her research interests are experimental Fluid mechanics. In her leisure time, she likes to read, cook and solve math riddles.

Victor Valeron

PhD Student (co-advised w/ Riccardo Betti and Fernando Garcia-Rubio)

Department of Mechanical Engineering

Link to Website

Hopeman 410

vvaleronur.rochester.edu

▾ show bio-sketch ▾

I obtained my Bachelor’s Degree in Aerospace Engineering in 2019 and my Master’s Degree in Aeronautical Engineering in 2022, both degrees granted at the Technical School of Aeronautical Engineering and Space (ETSIAE) at the Polytechnic University of Madrid (UPM) in Madrid, Spain. My final Master’s dissertation (TFM) dealt with the analysis of magnetized imploding cylinders and the consequent stabilization effects of the magnetic field in the deceleration and stagnation phases related to the Magneto-Inertial Fusion (MIF). This final Master’s thesis was supervised by Professor Francisco Javier Sanz Recio. Currently, I am on the verge of publishing a scientific paper regarding the mentioned stabilizing effects of the magnetic fields in these configurations. I was born in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain. However, my family roots are actually in Granada (also in Spain), where I grew up. My research interests are mainly the study of hydrodynamic instabilities with self-generated magnetic fields in the Magneto-Inertial Fusion context, combined with an immersion in the magnetothermal instability (MTI). In my leisure time I enjoy reading novels, writing poetry, practicing sports, such as soccer, tennis or running, and playing occasionally the transverse flute. I am also a huge fan of TV contests and quiz shows.

Hao Yin

PhD Student (co-advised w/ Jessica Shang)

Department of Mechanical Engineering

Link to Website

Hopeman 410

hyin8me.rochester.edu

▾ show bio-sketch ▾

Hao is a Mechanical Engineering PhD student at the University of Rochester. He also received his BS degree in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Rochester. His research interests are in the areas of high energy density flows, hydrodynamic instabilities, and turbulence. He is from Shanghai, China. During his free time, he enjoys jogging, swimming, cooking and watching esports.

Undergraduate Students

Maria Plessia

Senior student

Department of Mechanical Engineering

Link to CV

Hopeman 410

mplessiau.rochester.edu

▾ show bio-sketch ▾

Maria is currently an undergraduate at the University of Rochester pursuing a degree in Mechanical Engineering. She is originally from Tripoli, Greece. She has an interest in computational engineering, numerical methods, and programming. During her free time she enjoys playing the piano and cooking.

Yufei Zhao

Junior student

Computer Science

Link to CV

Hopeman 410

yzhao87u.rochester.edu

▾ show bio-sketch ▾

Yufei is an undergraduate student at the University of Rochester pursuing a degree in Computer Science and Economics. She was born in China. She likes travelling, cooking, and swimming.

Alumni

Perla Aguilar, General Dynamics, Detroit, MI

Xin Bian, CFD modeling at ArteryFlow

Alexander Boyd, The MITRE Corporation

Theodore Burke, software engineer in Madison, WI

Brendan Knight, Smith & Nephew Endoscopy

Aarne Lees, Laboratory for Laser Energetics

Daniel Mangino, General Motors

Jordy Mendez, grad school at NYU

Jonathan McLinn, Lockheed Martin

Philemon Rono, environmental engineering at Yu and Associates Inc., New Jersey

Africa Ruiz-Mora, Northrop Grumman

Mahmoud Sadek, Cairo University

Ifigeneia Stathaki, biotech data analysis at Casana

Huasen Zhang, Institute of Applied Physics and Mathematics

Dongxiao Zhao, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Collaborators