 I'm Eckhard Gaul. I'm the head of the School of Mechanical Engineering. It's my pleasure to be here and listen to our exciting associate professors. But it's my distinct pleasure now to introduce one of the associate professors in the School of Mechanical Engineering, James Gebert. James got his education completely at Clemson, a BS, MS, and PhD degree, the PhD in 2009. Then he stayed as a postdoc at Clemson for a couple of years and then he started his academic career as an assistant professor at Clarkson University and was there for a couple of years before he came over and joined Purdue in 2015 and then got promoted to associate professor last this summer in August and has done just a tremendous work for us. His research, James' research ranges from the development of embedded electromechanical sensors that exploits novel sensing techniques and material non-linearities to the understanding of dynamic interactions caused by continuous forces in non-linear systems or by discontinuous forces, I should say. So he applies his theoretical work to packaging and additive manufacturing and I'm sure we will learn a lot about a few of the other applications. The impact of his work has been recognized by the community among many other things, but for example by multiple invited talks. In particular, I would like to mention the 2018 conference on the theory and application of non-linear dynamics and the 2019 ASME conference on smart material and adaptive structures and intelligent systems. Also he has received the best paper awards with his students and the work that I mentioned in his research has been adopted by industry. In particular, I would like to mention his non-linear packaging modeling technique has have aided the development of new design tools for the packaging systems for plotters and are being applied by Hewlett Packard. A few other noteworthy items about James, he is an outstanding research mentor to his graduate students that I conduct exit interviews with all PhD students and they just love to work for him. What I greatly appreciate as the head too right now in the current environment, he works a lot with our undergraduate students on research and that is greatly appreciated. Another thing that is very close to my heart is global engineering education and he has a very strong relationship with the polytechnic Torino in Italy. He exchanges research as he works with researchers, he has some of them coming over and really I think helps us to maintain our global presence in this. Finally, one of the last points I wanted to make is also James does a fantastic job helping not just on the school level but in particular on the college level with diversity, equity and inclusion topics, activities, has been on panels, has helped the minority in engineering program and I think that all makes us a better place. Finally, in all of this what he has done, he has even written a textbook. He posted a textbook with one of our other colleagues in the School of Mechanical Engineering on statics. Thank you. Thank you for that introduction. I'm just going to talk a little bit about my academic journey and then I'll focus on some several interesting research projects but I've had quite a unique journey here at Purdue and I would like to share that. Before I do that though, I need to acknowledge my fellow travelers on this journey with me. That's my wife and my two daughters. Here's my journey. I came from a small town in the state of South Carolina called Star. I'm sure you've all heard of it. As I could mention, I received all my degrees at Clemson University which is ironic but I didn't intentionally plan to go to Clemson at first. I had a dual interest in history also and so becoming going into science was one choice. I've received all my degrees in mechanical engineering and along the way, I didn't even start as an engineer actually. I started as a computer scientist. The lady that you see here is Sue Lasser. She's in charge of the program. She brought students in over the summer to actually go to a calculus classes and she provided mentoring and she provided tutoring services. I didn't go to the calculus classes over the summer so I'm sorry about that if you're online. I actually went to Hawaii for a wedding so I enjoyed that but I did benefit greatly from this program and that's part of the reason I'm very passionate about giving back to these type of programs. I ended up tutoring in this program for years and I remember I could have a room full of students that would actually sit down, listen and explain things and they would be like well why didn't my professor explain it that way? And that continued on until I actually taught my first class as a PhD student and I listened to some of the other students explain what I taught and they say oh why didn't my professor explain it that way. So I think there's some kind of cognitive disconnect when it's you teaching as a student versus you teaching them as a professor and I think that's something that we don't explore often enough. The second individual that you'll see here is my PhD master's advisor and my PhD co-advisor. His name is Eric Austin. I discovered I had a passion for research as an undergraduate and working in his lab. I actually some of the things that you see that are present in my research now are due to him to his influence. My very first research project was embedding sensors and tires which as you'll see is kind of we've kind of kept that idea of embedding sensors. Eric was a great teacher, great mentor and still is a great friend. I remember taking his class he taught system dynamics out of Ogata and it's basically taught the whole book which in a semester which was a lot and I didn't realize that till afterwards. My second person that advised me was George Fidel in design optimization. George was a great mentor. He's taught me how to manage people very well and then so forth. So my journey though kind of takes this weird bifurcation as I like to call it. At the end of my PhD I finished my PhD and I didn't really know what I was going to do. I literally didn't know what I was going to do. I remember at the end I had spent so much time writing and I had been my daughter at that time and I hadn't really started looking seriously for a job. I had some job interviews but those I didn't really do well because I wasn't prepared as a faculty member and so the things that I I remember I remember that I had only one opportunity there that was to teach in the civil engineering. I called the professor up the night before and he said yeah there's a position open and he hired me and so during that time from teaching as a civil professor I taught statics dynamics fluid dynamics and during that time I worked with this gentleman here Mohammed Dekak on finishing and extending my PhD research into an NSF grant. We wrote the first NSF grant and I would like to say was funded. It was not. I remember being absolutely devastated and he looked at the reviews and he said we're going to do one thing we're just going to rearrange it. We rearranged it and it was funded. During that time I also worked on with this gentleman latter gentleman here Dr. Joseph on a postdoc with Michelin looking at the non-neumatic looking at the vibrations of non-neumatic tires and then from that point on I prepared myself to be a faculty member. I went to faculty talks I studied about what it takes to be a successful faculty member. I basically sought out mentors to help me become a faculty member something I wanted to do most of my life but before that I did spend some time. Eric had moved to Mogh CSA which ironically started by Clemson graduate and I spent some time at Mogh CSA looking at basically vibration isolation and satellite space situational awareness. I then transitioned to assistant professor in Clarkson and now at Purdue way too much time on it. Okay so my academic research interest non-linear dynamics smart materials and additive manufacturing and I look at the basically the convergence of these. Some of the sponsors and collaborator layers for our research are shown here and I'm only going to talk about a couple of our projects. I do some interesting non-linear work in multimodal systems but the things I want to highlight here was my first NSF grant as a lab here and this is basically looking at developing inexpensive sensors for smart packaging and wearable materials and so these inexpensive sensors are basically relying on static electricity and basically you take two dialectics come in contact charge develops on the surface you vary the voltage and it vary the distance and you get a current flowing through and so what we a lot of the performance of these systems depend on the initial surface charge distribution and air breakdown and so we develop very specialized equipment to actually look at the surface charge some through looking at the Coulomb force which you see with the probe at the top and others to directly measure the charging process to Coulomb force and to basically quantify static electricity and to improve the performance of these devices. Not only do we use these devices for to want to improve their performance but we actually want to utilize these and actually developing smart structures so a lot of my work has been actually embedding these devices into basic isolation systems for vibration structures and so here you see some of our work and basic devices embedded into polymer structures and in real time you can actually track the deformation corresponding to the voltage and you can actually it saturates at a certain point in addition it also provides some vibration some vibration absorption characteristics the other area that we where we're going with these cell sensing structures as we're going past the idea of a tribal electric centers just in elastomeric structures we have working with the army through the cooperative agreement with Purdue where the only group that's looking at actually protecting structures instead of actually blowing things up are explosives and we're looking at embedding them into metal structures using a process known as ultrasonic additive manufacturing we're not only using this process to embed our tribal electric structures but we're also using some embedded strain gauges and other smart material structures into metal surfaces for our purposes of armor so here you see my student touching one of these and is sensing his touch and then to the bottom right you see the strain gauge in metal and then you see the strain gauge in over okay other things that we've been doing with the army is looking at the sensorization of sla 3d printed composites and so we've basically developed a technique to basically embed structures and 3d printed sla ceramic blight materials it's not a true ceramic material but it does have the same failure mechanisms and this and the whole idea is to basically study the fracture as your as this armor is being penetrated other things that we've done in the lab is develop structure for programmable stiffness basically if you have a machine that has resonance frequency changes can you develop a platform to actually change the stiffness to accommodate for that and so we take this elastomeric structure and we program in we basically have cavities in and we can change the stiffness by selectively inserting rigid elements into this the simple elastomeric structure here that which has 12 rigid 12 cavities can actually represent 72 different stiffness states and I also 72 different possible natural frequency programming you can see some of the compression some of the frequency base it also has this encapsulated buckling that you can monitor that you can actually create structures that have quasi zero stiffness or nearly flat stiffness and that's useful for dynamic continuation especially if it's flat not this quasi zero if you're loading pre loading to that range and this idea of embedding the tree programmability we did this on simple inserts that are horizontal and vertical but you can also change the shape and change the behavior of this and so you see some different candidate shapes on the bottom here with different strength force displacement relationships also and perhaps my most impactful work has been in researching and packaging dynamics this has been with a partner at Clemson Greg Bat the College of Agricultural Engineering is basically working with the International Safe Transit Association um which basically regular regulates packaging landsmott and some testing done in coordination with Eli Lilly and so here some of the work that is to want it for us is to actually look at the possibility of multi-axis vibration response and packaging because most typical packages are quantified with um vertical excitations so here we're looking at what happens when you have excitations in multiple directions so for this project it's probably the most fun I've ever had on a project we basically outfitted a box truck with sensors and drove it over a controlled track and had a chase car so you can see some of the vibrations of the truck and inside we looked inside the package we uh you can see the vibrations of the package and then we reproduced this at a shaker at Eli Lilly to show that you can qualitatively get the same type of motion testing as you can um as you can just measure other things that we've done with this uh we have the same type of facilities here at Herrick labs and so we've done some sensor placement studies to actually determine how you best uh how you best actually measure this um vibrations and we've also done work with a shot quantification with HP in which effort is mentioned since I'm running low on time I want to skip to some of my teaching outreach uh basically I teach mostly basic mechanics courses mechanical vibrations and introduction non-linear systems I've helped with a lecture book um helped edit a lecture book here with my colleagues uh Jeff uh Jeff Rose and Jeff Crossgirl again I spend a lot of time doing group outreach um some at the girl stem instituted IUPUI others at the imagination station and I work closely with MEP this is us at this promise event that was held recently okay so I would like to acknowledge all my students both Clarkson Clemson and at Purdue uh my formal mentors Patricia Davies Jeff uh Jeff Rose my department chair is a new uh former department chair Neil but not Bajaj and after girl my current department chair and uh teaching mentor Chuck Crossgirl but in general I would like to acknowledge all of the ME department and Purdue they've been extremely welcoming extremely helpful extremely open uh here's the picture of my group and some of that things that we've done together and thank you thank you very much James uh really nice uh do we have any questions no questions online yet let me ask you a question uh right so you're you have 10 year now you can speak freely uh you have three department heads here and amongst that here right we want want to make you successful right I mean that was kind of his message right we want to do our best to really help you so here's your chance what can you tell me what I need to do to uh help you that's a loaded question that is a loaded question but uh maybe a snippet or something that comes to mind right like how uh the Purdue administration in general can help associate professors uh to uh to get to the next level so I know there are already exist mechanisms for you to retool your research in area uh in other areas I think that would be nice to be expanded for more uh for uh expanded opportunities um specifically I'm probably the wrong person to ask this effort and I will be on that's good I mean maybe that that speaks for what you said at the end you feel very well supported and very uh in a in an environment where you can grow and uh and move forward but if there ever is anything you know please do let me know uh any other questions yes please what's next oh what's next um so I want to focus more on some theoretical work in multi-axis vibration and basically looking at that and how it corresponds to natural systems so uh and basically looking at what can we learn from I mean not multi-axis multimodal vibrations what can we learn from natural systems to exchange energy and to create resilient structures so that is one area that I would like to pursue um the other area that I would like to pursue even more is the idea of the programmable structures I think we've only this idea of placing inserts and changing the stiffness is only the beginning it seems it's very promising uh there's um I didn't show some of the preliminary work but some of the best performance we had were out of materials that were recyclable like paper instead of plastic and so now you can start thinking about uh developing engineering structures that are actually sustainable and the reason I really feel important about this is because of basically the incidents in Haiti I mean uh yes in Haiti and in Japan but during the tsunami and earthquake and you can see the damage that was brought in Haiti versus Japan in just because of money so if we can develop sustainable deep inexpensive resilient absorption structures I think is very important very good thank you any other questions this is good as some idea I am I don't have a question I just want to congratulate James for all the accomplishment I was amazed and impressed thank you very much great seeing you thank you good awesome thank you all right I think we may be good then the questions am I clothing this house whereas where did I even go you know like when you need him you know so okay so I'd be happy to close us out then I want to thank you again for attending today I want to thank our three speakers today our three associate professors I think we have tremendous talents at Purdue and that comes clearly through so it's it's wonderful to hear your stories and with that I have a great day and goodbye