Faculty Affiliates

Areas of remediation design, microbial sensing, and sustainable industrial practice.         

My major research interest is in understanding the inter-relationships between processing, alloying, microstructure and properties in metallic materials – and in incorporating this knowledge into computational tools for use in research, education and engineering.  An important part of my research is development of Integrated Computational Materials Engineering (ICME) tools – and thus collaborations with other computational and experimental groups are an essential element of my work.  Central to my research are investigations on the evolution of microstructures - current examples include precipitate evolution, recrystallization and grain growth and texture development in magnesium, aluminum and titanium alloys.  I am also interested in mechanical behavior of these materials, with an emphasis on development of mechanistic and phenomenological understanding of the influence of microstructure on properties such as strength, ductility and fatigue resistance.

Thermal and fluid sciences, multiscale computational model development, radiative heat transfer, optics, chemical kinetics of heterogeneous reactions, electrochemical engineering, semiconductor physics

Sustainable development in developing countries, understanding the differences between experts and laypeople in environmental decision-making, designing sustainable developments to be more acceptable to rural residents, promoting the adoption of sustainable transportation, and designing environments that simultaneously enhance individual and communal well-being.

The overarching theme of my research has been to identify situations where male and female reproduction come into conflict with one another. When animals sexually reproduce, one sex generally invests more in the production and care of offspring than another. In mammalian species, this is typically the female, due to the high costs of gestation and lactation. Such an imbalance leads to conflicting reproductive strategies for males and females – a theoretical framework known as sexual conflict. In addition to identifying these situations across mammals, I also want to understand how this conflict plays out in terms of physiology and behavior. The bulk of my research program is focused on female counterstrategies to male coercive reproductive tactics, such as infanticide. This includes strategies such as male-mediated pregnancy termination (for pregnant females) and deceptive fertility (for lactating females). Ultimately, my goal is to incorporate these strategies into evolutionary models that are able to predict social systems across mammals.

I tackle this research from an evolutionary perspective while utilizing a comparative (i.e., examining the same research question across different species) and mechanistic (i.e., assessing fecal hormone profiles) approach. My study subjects have been non-human primates (baboons, geladas, and – recently added – capuchins) living in their natural environments in Africa and the Americas. These primates provide ideal study subjects because they are highly social animals with a high degree of reproductive skew. In other words, not all animals get to reproduce equally (the primary currency for evolution), and thus my main line of inquiry is to determine why some animals are more successful at reproduction than others.

Dr. Bergman is interested in social behavior and social cognition from an evolutionary perspective. His research on social cognition in primates focuses on the cognitive abilities that underlie social behavior. Specifically, he looks at how dominance and family relationships structure primate social groups and then ask what do the members of these groups know about this structure? Ultimately, he is interested in the causal connections between sociality and cognition. Dr. Bergman is also interested in vocal communication, primarily as it relates to other social behaviors. How do vocalizations mediate social interactions? What social factors might favor larger vocal repertoires? Much of his research addresses sexual selection, looking at how primates assess competitors and potential mates. Recently, he has become interested in hormone-behavior interactions. He uses non-invasive hormone sampling as a way to both measure the physiological consequences of behavior and to assess potential determinants of behavior. Finally, he is interested in the ways that ecology shapes social systems and behaviors.

Dr. Bergman’s research addresses these questions in two types of free ranging primates: 1) Gelada monkeys (Theropithecus gelada) in Ethiopia, and 3) Capuchins (Cebus capucinus) in Costa Rica. His research involves observation, vocal recordings, hormonal and genetic sampling, as well as playback experiments.

Automotive engineering including: fuel production and formulation, alternative fuels, diesel combustion, spark ignition combustion, autoignition, spray behavior, particulate emissions, NOx emissions, emissions control, thermodynamics of energy conversion systems

Instrument development and field measurements focusing on the impacts of global change on atmospheric oxidant photochemistry and atmosphere-biosphere interactions         

Research focuses on reducing the environmental and health impacts of a variety of airborne aerosols. Current areas of activity include:

• Electrostatic precipitation of aerosols with particular interest in the coupling between the fluid and electric fields (i.e., electro-hydrodynamics);
• Non-Thermal plasmas as a means for inactivating airborne infectious agents such as viruses & bacteria in ventilation air;
• Aerosol optical properties, with emphasis on new emission sources of particulate carbon and potential contributions to atmospheric climate forcing and climate change;
• Air toxic compounds emitted from combustion processes and their control;
• Liquid droplet combustion, especially non-ideal behavior contributing to formation of products of incomplete combustion.

Ecosystem Modeling, Terrestrial Ecology, Biogeochemistry, Ecosystem Responses to Environmental Change Related to Energy Production         

Psychology of environmental stewardship; and the relationship among the concepts of self-interest, competence and psychological well-being    

System dynamics and control; mathematical modeling; model reduction; multi-body dynamics; networked hardware-in-the-loop simulation; biomechanics. Application areas: vehicle dynamics; vehicle powertrains; energy systems; driver modeling; human stance and balance.

Heterogeneous catalysis, Lean NOx emissions control, Fuel Processing for Fuel Cells and Emissions Control, Three-way Catalysis, Exhaust Sensors

Carina Gronlund is an environmental epidemiologist and research assistant professor at the Institute for Social Research in the Social Environment and Health Program. In collaboration with state and Detroit government and Detroit community partners, she studies the separate and combined effects of climate change and air pollution and vulnerabilities by social, pre-existing health, and built environment characteristics. This research will help cities understand how to adapt to climate change.

She received her BA in Biology from the University of Chicago, with a specialization in Ecology and Evolution. Subsequently, she worked as a research assistant in the Clinical Trials Office at the Karmanos Cancer Institute in Detroit, MI before pursing a Masters in Public Health at the University of Michigan. She completed her MPH in 2008 and then completed her PhD in 2013 in the University of Michigan Department of Environmental Health Sciences, where she was a National Institute on Aging Public Health and Aging trainee. Her dissertation focused on associations between high temperatures and hospital admissions and mortality among the elderly as well as sociodemographic and land cover characteristics that modify these associations. As a Graham Sustainability Institute Dow Postdoctoral Fellow, she studied vulnerability to the cardiovascular effects of high temperatures using longitudinal studies of cardiovascular risk from 7 U.S. cities.

The incentives associated with pollution policies in a variety of contexts, the distributional effects of environmental programs, policy analysis, and a range of environmental issues         

Food Systems Planning, International Planning, Program Evaluation

As Assistant Director of Academic Programs in the UM College of Engineering Center for Entrepreneurship, she is responsible for managing the Program in Entrepreneurship, teaching the capstone Entrepreneurship Course, and developing new focus areas such as Social Entrepreneurship and a Masters Program in High Tech Entrepreneurship. She also conducts research on innovative teaching methods and entrepreneurship.

Pam Jagger is a global leader in interdisciplinary population and environment research. She is an applied political economist whose research focuses on the dynamics of poverty and environment interactions in low-income countries. She leads the interdisciplinary Forest Use, Energy, and Livelihoods (FUEL) Lab, and is the Director of the National Science Foundation funded Energy Poverty PIRE in Southern Africa (EPPSA), a 5-year collaborative program to support research and training on the topic of energy access in Southern Africa. FUEL Lab research is currently organized around three themes: environment and livelihoods, environmental governance, and energy poverty. The first theme focuses on quantifying the role of forests and the other environmental resources in household consumption and income generation, and understanding how contributions change in response to land use land cover change, implementation of conservation and development projects, and population dynamics. The second theme examines the livelihood impacts of changes in environmental governance and institutions on access to environmental goods and services. The third theme examines household energy access including understanding the effectiveness of interventions designed to mitigate energy poverty and improve access to electricity and cleaner cooking and novel research questions related to the effects of land cover and land use change on energy access and human health. Dr. Jagger has worked as a policy research scholar with the World Bank, Resources for the Future, the International Food Policy Research Institute, and the Center for International Forestry Research.

Andrew Jones is a public health nutritionist, interested in understanding the influence of agriculture and food systems on the nutritional status of women and children in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Specifically, his research examines four major areas:

1. how agricultural and landscape biodiversity influences diet quality and food security among smallholder farming households in LMICs;
2. how livestock rearing impacts anemia among adolescent girls and women of reproductive age through both nutrition- and infection-related pathways;
3. the role of food systems changes associated with the “nutrition transition” in LMICs in potentiating risk of concurrent iron deficiency and obesity, and the impacts of urbanicity and household food security in mediating these dynamics; and;
4. the implications for food systems of aligning dietary recommendations with goals for environmental sustainability.

My goal is to enable smart water systems. My research interests include sensors, data and water.

Environmental technology, green buildings, and sustainable building materials         

Chemodynamics- what is it?  The adsorption of gases in nanoporous materials; the movement of microorganisms in aquifer media; the binding of metals onto intracellular proteins: these are all phenomena associated with chemodynamics, the study of chemical fate and transport.  Our research group investigates both theoretical and applied aspects of chemodynamics using an integrated program of molecular modeling, computer simulation and experiment.  An interconnecting theme of our work is the application of atomistic methods and statistical simulation to address a spectrum of research problems spanning chemical, biomedical and environmental engineering.

(a) the intersection between development and climate, especially concerning the relationship between anti-poverty programs and risk management (b) the use of technoscientific information, especially seasonal climate (El Nino forecasting) in building adaptive capacity to climate variability and change (drought planning, water management, and agriculture) in the U.S. (Great Lakes) and Latin America (Brazil, Mexico and Chile); (c) the impact of technocratic decisionmaking on issues of democracy and equity; (d) the co-production of science and policy and the role of technocrats as decisionmakers; (e) the role of popular participation in urban environmental policymaking and policymaker/client interactions; (f)U.S.-Mexico border region environmental policymaking especially regarding transboundary water conflict, environmental health, a common use of shared natural resources.

Sustainable infrastructure development, hazard mitigation and environmental improvement through materials technology         

Fuel cells, chiral synthesis, carbon catalysis, catalysis at nano-scales, fundamentals of surface activity and selectivity.         

My research focuses on environmental biotechnology and water quality with an emphasis on engineered treatment systems. My specific interests focus on the fate of chemical stressors in these systems (e.g., toxins, pharmaceuticals, trace contaminants), the use of technologies to sense and remove these chemicals, antibiotic resistance, and on resource recovery from wastewater.         

My research focuses on ways to reduce the environmental impact, cost, and inefficiency of electric power systems via new operational and control strategies. I am particularly interested in developing new methods to actively engage distributed flexible resources such as energy storage, electric loads, and distributed renewable resources in power system operation. This is especially important in power systems with high penetrations of wind and solar. In my work, I use methods from a variety of fields including controls, optimization, and statistics. I am also interested in using engineering methods to inform energy policy and energy economics.

As the Senior Project Manager for Graham’s Climate + Energy activities, Sarah manages UM's partnership with the Michigan Office of Climate and Energy, helping communities across the state consider energy in their land use planning, zoning, and other policymaking. Through this work, she is developing templates, case studies, and other guidance documents that can help local governments across the state set policies related to clean energy.

Sarah also conducts research at the intersection of energy policy and land use planning--especially in rural communities.  Her current work focuses on how renewable energy development impacts rural communities (positively and negatively), the disparate reactions of rural landowners to wind and solar projects, and how state and local policies facilitate or hinder renewable energy deployment.

Professor Mohai’s teaching and research interests are focused on environmental justice, public opinion and the environment, and influences on environmental policy making. He is a founder of the Environmental Justice Program at the University of Michigan and a major contributor to the growing body of quantitative research examining disproportionate environmental burdens and their impacts on low income and people of color communities. In 1990, he co-organized with Dr. Bunyan Bryant the “Michigan Conference on Race and the Incidence of Environmental Hazards”, which was credited by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as one of two events bringing the issue of Environmental Justice to the attention of the Agency. He is author or co-author of numerous articles, books, and reports focused on race and the environment, including “Environmental Racism: Reviewing the Evidence”, “Race and the Incidence of Environmental Hazards”, “Toxic Waste and Race at Twenty”, and “Which Came First, People or Pollution?”. His current research involves national level studies examining the causes of environmental disparities and the role environmental factors play in accounting for racial and socioeconomic disparities in health. Through a grant from the Kresge Foundation, he is also examining pollution burdens around public schools and the links between such burdens and student performance and health.

Human preferences and behavior in relation alternative landscape patterns and management.regimes and associated ecosystem services. Design techniques for contributing to transdisciplinary research and policy development.         

Chair of Urban and Regional Planning: Environmental Planning, Sustainable Development, Land Use & Planning Law, Coastal Area Resource Management, Planning Theory, and research methods

Property and environmental law issues, particularly issues relating to land use law, regulatory takings, and environmental liability         

Shobita Parthasarathy’s research focuses on the governance of potentially transformative science and technology in comparative perspective. To date, much of her work has focused on the ethical, social, political, and legal dimensions of the new life sciences.

Major research interest involves biological diversity in agrecosystems. Research focuses on the effects of agricultural intensification and its impact on biodiversity and pest control ecosystem services. Another aspect of the research relates to urban agriculture and arthropod mediated ecosystem services. Most of this research is conducted in Mexico, Puerto Rico and Michigan. More general interest is related to sustainable agriculture and food sovereignty in Latin America.

Political feasibility of pollution prevention and subnational governmental capacity to anticipate policy challenges posed by global warming         

Current research interests range from the molecular dynamics of mechanical relaxation of polymers to the high-speed, low-cost manufacturing of fiber composite structures and includes fracture processes in polymers and composites and failure analysis. Related to mechanical relaxation is the physical aging of polymer glasses. The nature of molecular motion in polymer glasses and the parameters that control the kinetics of physical aging are being studied. The goal is to be able to predict aging rates at normal service temperatures where experimental measurements would take too long. Current study of fracture processes ranges from fundamental studies of the mechanisms of crack propagation in brittle materials to the use of fracture in fiber composite structures for crash energy absorption. Research into high-speed, low-cost fiber composite structure manufacturing involves several problems of the "liquid molding" process, in which liquid resin is injected into a closed mold containing a fiber preform. The problems being studied are the design and manufacture of the fiber preform and the displacement of air and the wetting of the fibers by the injected resin. A related problem being studied is the repair of such composite structures after damage         

Fundamental and applied research in heterogeneous catalysis, thin films, and chemical sensors         

Development of high-capacity materials and systems for energy storage applications; computational materials science; nanoscale chemistry and its impact on the mechanical properties of materials; thermodynamics and kinetics of phase transformations; multi-scale modeling; integrated computational materials engineering

Environmental and Sustainable Technology (EAST) systems; life cycle product and process optimization; and pollution prevention in manufacturing         

Systems and control including machine design, control, monitoring, and diagnostics; physical system modeling; automated modeling; bond graph theory; proper modeling of active suspensions; proper vehicle handling and ride models; high efficiency dynamic formulations for vehicle dynamics; monitoring and control of thermally induced spindle bearing loads; design and control of high speed spindles and novel milling machines.

Control system development and optimization for marine and automotive propulsion systems, with in-depth experience and expertise on system modeling, identification, control algorithm development and integration, control system rapid prototyping and experimental validation. Modeling, control and optimization of fuel cell systems and fuel cell based combined heat and power (CHP) systems, emphasis on transient management for mobile applications. Adaptive control theory, with focus on algorithm and tool development aiming at improved transient performance and convergence properties. Advanced control methodologies, including optimal control and nonlinear control, and their applications to marine and automotive systems. Methodologies and tools for developing and managing complex dynamic control systems with interactive subsystems and constraints.         

Fuel processing catalysts, fuel cells, and nanostructured films         

Trumpey's teaching focuses on experiential observation, drawing connections with the natural world.

Ecologically compatible bio-manufacturing processes         

Major research interests center on radiation materials science and environmental effects on metals, including stress corrosion cracking, high temperature corrosion and hydrogen embrittlement. Current work in the area of stress corrosion cracking focuses on the determination of the mechanism of intergranular cracking in austenitic alloys in high temperature aqueous solutions with emphasis on the role of grain boundary structure, chemistry and deformation. Ion irradiation and stress corrosion cracking are linked through an investigation of the mechanism of irradiation in the assisted stress corrosion cracking of core components in nuclear reactors, by using proton irradiation to study the effects of neutron irradiation. Other current projects are on stress corrosion cracking in supercritical water, oxidtion of nickel-base alloys in very high temperature, impure He gas and irradiation creep of pyrolytic carbon.         

Environmental Dispute Resolution, Collaborative Ecosystem Management         

His research interests include statistical learning, high-dimensional data and statistical network analysis. He is also interested in applications in medicine, computational biology, engineering, physics and business. Professor Zhu received a CAREER award from the NSF in 2008 and was elected a member of ISI in 2010 and a fellow of ASA in 2013.