Two new tenure-track faculty members are joining the Department of Mechanical Engineering (MECH) at Rice.
They are among this year’s 21 new faculty hires in the George R. Brown School of Engineering. This latest group of researchers and teachers further establishes the school’s prominence in its key research areas: health and well-being, energy and sustainability, resilient and adaptive communities, advanced materials, and future computing.
The new members of the MECH faculty are:
Raudel Avila, assistant professor: Avila earned his Ph.D. in MECH this year from Northwestern University, where he received a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship and an Outstanding Researcher Award from the International Institute of Nanotechnology. His research combines mechanics, materials and electromagnetic concepts to engineer bioelectronics for health care and biomedical applications. He is developing a theoretical and computational framework to study the scalability, packaging, power limitations, tissue interactions and energy absorption in such devices. He joined the Rice faculty on July 1.
Vanessa Sanchez, assistant professor: Sanchez earned her Ph.D. in materials science and mechanical engineering from Harvard in 2022 and now serves as a postdoctoral fellow in chemical engineering at Stanford University, where she was awarded a $300,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to research active materials based on supramolecular shape memory polymer fibers. Her research group will work on responsive textiles for assistive wearables spanning from the molecular to the structural and device levels. She will join the Rice faculty on July 1, 2024.