The Department of Mechanical Engineering is pleased to welcome Dr. Chen Li who will join the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics as Assistant Professor in Winter 2015-2016. Beginning this summer Dr. Li will hold interim appointment as Assistant Research Professor in ME while he completes his postdoctoral research at Berkeley.
Dr. Li completed his PhD at the School of Physics at Georgia Institute of Technology in 2011. Since 2012 Dr. Li has been a Miller Fellow at University of California, Berkeley in the Poly-PEDAL Lab and Biomimetic Millisystems Lab.Dr. Li’s research aims to create terradynamics and advance understanding of animal locomotion and robotic mobility in the real world. Aero- and hydrodynamics help us understand how animals fly and swim in air and water and develop aerial and aquatic vehicles. During terrestrial locomotion, the complexity of interactions of animals and devices with real-world terrain often rivals or even exceeds that with fluids; however, the physics of these interactions is relatively unknown. Dr. Li’s long term research vision is to bridge this gap by creating terradynamics—analogous to aero- and hydrodynamics—to enable quantitative prediction of forces and movement in complex terrain. For example, Dr. Li’s research has resulted in creation of the first terradynamics of legged locomotion on granular media (Fig. 1), and discovery of terradynamic streamlining for locomotion in cluttered terrain (Fig. 2). Dr. Li was recently awarded a highly competitive Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award at the Scientific Interface to support his research on terradynamics.