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PhD Program
Faculty Recruiting PhD Students for Fall 2025

Please review the list of faculty who are actively seeking new Ph.D. students for Fall 2025. Browse their web pages and look through a few faculty publications prior to contacting potential advisors as these steps can help you to articulate what excites you about a faculty member's research program.

Faculty Member Research Area Example Projects
Oluwaseyi Balogun Material Systems

Ecosystems

Urban Systems
  • Incremental wave propagation in hyperviscoelastic soft materials
  • Elastic wave propagation in nanostructured phononic lattices and metamaterials
  • Probing local heat flow in disordered semiconducting materials
Yu Marco Nie

Urban Systems

Human Systems
  • Toward an integrative approach to machine learning for traffic management. Funded by National Science Foundation.

  • Impact of modularized autonomous vehicles on transit system design and operations, Funded by Center of Connected and Automated Transportation.
Pablo Durango-Cohen

Urban Systems

Human Systems
  • Supply-chain decarbonization
Sinan Keten

Material Systems

Ecosystems
  • computational materials modeling
Giorgia Chinazzo

Urban Systems

Human Systems
  • "Revitalizing Spaces: How Building Retrofits Impact Occupant Health"
  • "Climate-Proofing for All: Equitable Solutions in Building Retrofits"
  • "Exploring Equity and Justice in Indoor Environmental Quality"
Amanda Stathopoulos

Urban Systems

Human Systems
  • Travel behavior adaptations in extreme heat: modeling & communicating
  • The potential for community-informed mobility hubs: modeling with mixed methods data
  • Heavy duty vehicle fleet conversion: Industry and community-informed modeling
Erica Hartmann

Material Systems

Ecosystems

Human Systems
  • Indoor environmental quality and human health
  • Understanding and engineering bacteriophage
Alessandro Rotta Loria

Material Systems

Urban Systems
  • Fighting the erosion of marine clays with electricity
  • Fighting the erosion of marine sands with electricity
  • The energy potential of underground climate change
Giuseppe Buscarnera

Material Systems

Urban Systems
  • Subsurface Carbon Storage
  • Adaptive Granular Systems
Jean-François Gaillard

Material Systems

Ecosystems

Urban Systems

Human Systems
  • Co and Ni recovery using supported manganese oxides
  • Biouptake of mercury
  • metal sensing in drinking water
  • recovery-reuse of tailing materials
George Wells

Material Systems

Ecosystems

Urban Systems

Human Systems
  • Nitrogen recovery as value-added products
  • molecular microbial ecology of engineered bioprocesses for water resource recovery
  • metabolic handoffs in the microbial nitrogen cycle
Ludmilla Aristilde

Material Systems

Ecosystems

Urban Systems
  • Mineral catalysis in organic matter reactivity
  • Biodegradation of plastics
  • Metabolism in biofilm formation
Zdenek Bazant

Material Systems

Urban Systems
  • mechanics if deep geologic sequestration of CO2 and geothermal heat extraction
  • testing and theory of creep of moren concretes with stron selfdesiccation
Hani Mahmassani

Urban Systems

Human Systems
  • transportation systems planning and design
  • freight and logistics
  • travel behavior
Luisa Marcelino 

Ecosystems
  • Investigating gene expression in coral adaptation to heat through computational genomics analysis of heat-resistant and heat-sensitive coral transcriptomes.
  • Uncovering the chromatin structure (DNA-protein complex) in heat-resistant and heat-sensitive corals using chromatin sequencing and electron microscopy imaging.
  • Exploring how chromatin remodeling (winding and unwinding) influences gene expression plasticity to enhance coral adaptation to warmer oceans, using computational genomics and modeling.
Federico Ciardo

Material Systems

Urban Systems
  • Elastodynamic effects on slip complexity on frictional faults
  • Numerical modeling slow and fast slip on geometrically complex fault zones
Lucia Stein-Montalvo

Material Systems

Urban Systems
  • fluid-structure interactions
  • deployable and reconfigurable structures
  • elastic instabilities for adaptive architecture