Job description:
Multiple graduate research assistant openings are available in the mechanical, 
aerospace, and biomedical engineering (MABE) department at the University of 
Tennessee, Knoxville, for the spring semester of 2024. The positions are for Ph.D. 
in Mechanical / Aerospace Engineering (starting salary range: $26.000). We have 
close collaboration with the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, the Pennylvania 
State University, and MIT. Topics include:
1)	High-fidelity MDO (especially CFD with laminar-turbulent transition model, 
time-spectral/harmonic balance, and aeroelasticity).
2)	Control co-design and digital twin.
More details can be found on my website: https://sichenghe.github.io/research/
Prior experience in computational work and programming skills are valued. Students 
with mechanical, aerospace, control, engineering physics, and applied math 
engineering backgrounds are welcome. These positions come with full funding, 
including stipend, health care, and tuition waiver.


To-dos if you are interested:

1)	Send your resume, transcript, and contact info for one previous research 
advisor to sicheng@utk.edu. 
2)	Sharing one report or a GitHub repo for a previous project will also be 
helpful. 

About the PI:
Sicheng He (website: https://sichenghe.github.io) is an assistant professor at the 
mechanical, aerospace, and biomedical engineering (MABE) department at the 
University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He was a postdoc researcher at the LAE led by 
Prof. Steven Barrett (interim department head) and Dr. Raymond Speth, affiliated 
with the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, MIT.  He obtained a Ph.D. 
from the MDO lab at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, supervised by Prof. 
Joaquim R. R. A. Martins. FAA, DOE ARPA-e, and AFOSR sponsored previous research 
projects. His research interest is applying multidisciplinary design optimization 
(MDO) to develop a better design / developing MDO methods to enable its 
application to problems never solved before.  His previous research includes off-
shore wind turbine design optimization, aircraft flutter suppression, aerodynamic 
shape optimization with laminar-turbulent transition mechanism, aerodynamic shape 
optimization using machine learning, and convex programming-based novel structural 
optimization algorithm development.  Recently, he has been working on methods to 
include more sophisticated dynamical system models (e.g., bifurcation and LCO) and 
control as a discipline in MDO (also known as control co-design). He is a co-
organizer of the online fluid mechanics forums IBIM seminar: http://ibim-
conference.com/. For more details about Dr. He, see https://sichenghe.github.io. 
To learn more about MDO, see Prof. Martins’ recent textbook 
https://mdobook.github.io/.

About the school:
The Tickle College of Engineering is undergoing a period of substantial growth in 
both physical infrastructure and research expenditures as it seeks to become a Top 
25-ranked public institution. The college has seven departments with 186 faculty 
members, 3,393 undergraduates, and 1,155 graduate students. The department 
currently has 59 faculty members and enrolls some 1,331 undergraduate and 182 
graduate students. Research expenditures in the department are currently at $15M 
per year. More information regarding the department may be found at mabe.utk.edu.