Engineering the Tools of Scientific Discovery
At a Glace: Grand Challenge Core Components
Aakash's selected Grand Challenge is the last but not least of the fourteen outlined by the NAE, Engineering tools for Scientific Discovery. Quoting the NAE website : "In the century ahead, engineers will continue to be partners with scientists in the great quest for understanding many unanswered questions of nature."
Click on each image to see each area he has completed the following in the major core areas.
Further below is information on what Aakash's plans are in the long term.
SERVICE
GLOBAL
RESEARCH
ENTREPRENEURSHIP
INTERDISCIPLINARY
Motivations
"Before college, I joined many different environmental, science and robotics clubs. I became very interested in mechanical engineering, specifically, after reading a National Geographic article on the Deepsea Challenger, a vessel designed to reach the deepest point on earth. As humanity’s reach expands and we explore more extreme environments, there is a need for advancing scientific tools of discovery. I plan to attain a PhD and lead a research group pioneering technologies for exploration with biomimetic robotics, which uses nature as the inspiration for designs we can model, recreate, and apply.​"
Scubabot from Stanford University practices with a diver.
Origami inspired robots in Harvard's Microrobotics Lab.
MIT Biomimetics Lab cheetah robot walking around campus.
"The different research projects I have worked with have built upon one another. My freshman summer, my project at North Carolina State University involved secondary use of traction batteries as a storage unit; I increased the efficiency of data analysis to accelerate the project to near completion. The coding techniques and literature review process were transferred to my sustained project at University of Maryland, Baltimore County. I am developing a bi-material time dependent pipe model to find what are the leading factors in failure of water mains. The non-dimensionality of the model led into the idea behind my research at Texas A&M University. Non-dimensional ratios were used to match the physical response of a full-scale drilling rig to that of a lab-scale system, a novel method. As I have progressed in research, my mechanical engineering curriculum compliments and synergies with my work.
​
Just as I enjoy conducting research I also get the same enjoyment from helping others and fostering diversity. I have tutored an array of math, physics and engineering courses and became a teaching fellow. I am also a mentor for the Meyerhoff Scholars and ME-STEM program. I lead the organization of a cross-cultural event at UMBC called PANGEA to encourage cross-cultural exchange. I imagine myself as a research professor leading an incredibly diverse lab in both research interests and people."