Join us in welcoming Lucas Meza, Jeffrey Lipton and Soyoung Kang to ME and congratulating current faculty members on their recent promotions.

Lucas Meza, Assistant Professor

Lucas Meza will join us this winter from the University of Cambridge where he was a research associate studying the micromechanical behavior of 3D woven fiber composites. Previously, he was at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where he worked on ultralight, hierarchical metamaterials composed of nanoscale ceramics that attained high strength and had the capacity recover after significant compression.

Meza holds a Ph.D. (’16) and master’s degree (’13) in mechanical engineering from Caltech. He received his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2011.

At the UW, Meza plans to investigate the connection between small-scale material phenomena and large-scale mechanical properties in natural and engineered materials with the specific goal of using nanoscale architecture as a design tool to create new materials with novel mechanical properties. His work has been featured in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science and Nature Materials, and he was given the Robert W. Cahn Paper of the Year Award in 2014 by the Journal of Materials Science.

Jeffrey Lipton, Assistant Professor

Jeffrey Lipton is currently at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology completing a postdoctoral fellowship on robotics and 3D printing for automatic fabrication and manufacturing. He will join our faculty in summer 2019.

Lipton develops robotic systems that build on 3D computational technology to expand the range on-demand, printable flexible materials. He uses robots to create novel materials and manufacturing methods with the capacity to expand robotic capabilities. He has partnered with Boeing to generate closed cell foams to protect robots from impact as well as plant workers from peripheral nerve damage caused by manufacturing vibrations.

Lipton received his Ph.D. and master’s degree in mechanical engineering from Cornell University in 2015. He holds a bachelor’s degree in applied and engineering physics (’10) from Cornell as well.

As a Ph.D. candidate at Cornell, Lipton led the Fab@Home Lab which makes open-source 3D printer kits for use in bio-research labs. His work using 3D printers to print food received coverage in the New York Times, Wired and Popular Mechanics. He also co-founded two companies: GEMS Boxes, a platform for distributing opioid antidotes, and Seraph Robotics, which commercialized Fab@Home technology.

Soyoung Kang, Lecturer

Soyoung Kang joins us as a lecturer for Engineering Innovation in Health, ME's program that promotes collaboration between engineering and the health sciences to develop solutions to pressing health challenges. An ME alumna, Kang received her Ph.D. from the UW in 2018. Her research focuses on developing an optical molecular imaging system to enable early cancer detection and guide the surgical resection of tumors. She has worked for several European health-care institutes, including Philips Research in The Netherlands and IMTEK and IBA in Germany.

Faculty promotions

We are also pleased to announce that, effective this fall, Alberto Aliseda has been promoted to full professor from associate professor, and Steve Brunton and Kat M. Steele have been promoted to associate professors from assistant professors.

Join us in welcoming our new faculty and congratulating our current faculty members on their promotions.