Our Team

ROHINI BALA CHANDRAN

Assistant Professor, Mechanical Engineering

Rohini is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan. She obtained her B.S. (2008) from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS-Pilani), India, an M.S (2010) and a Ph.D. (2015) from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, all in Mechanical Engineering. She was a postdoctoral researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory between 2015-2017 in the Energy Storage & Distributed Resources division.

Graduate Students

LUISA BARRERA

ME PhD Student 

Luisa obtained her Bachelor's degree in Materials Science and Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2016.
​She is currently working on photoelectrochemical approaches for water splitting and wastewater treatment applications. 

FAWAZ ALI

 ME MS Student

​Fawaz is a Master’s student in ME. He earned his Bachelor’s of Science in Mechanical Engineering at Northeastern University in December 2016. Fawaz is currently working on thermal energy storage systems using thermochemical storage systems to improve the overall thermodynamic efficiencies of the process.

XINGYU ZHOU

ME MS Student

Xingyu obtained his Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering from Purdue University (2016). He is currently working on modeling and simulation of the flow dynamics of granular materials in a vertical channel.

BINGJIA LI

ME MS Student

PRATYUSH AGARWAL

ME PhD Student

Pratyush obtained his Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT, Roorkee). He will be working on modeling radiative transport in granular materials for high temperature energy storage applications for concentrated solar power applications

KORY NELSON

Dual (ME and Energy Systems) MS Student

Kory received his bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from The University of Iowa in 2013.  He spent four years in industry working as a manufacturing engineer as well as senior research and development engineer. He is interested in grid-scale renewable energy solutions. He is currently evaluating high-temperature energy storage systems for CSP applications that couple sensible heat storage with thermochemical energy storage.  

YUDONG CHEN

ME MS Student 

Yudong earned his Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Michigan(2017). He also obtained another Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University(2017). He is currently working on the theory and simulations of electrocatalyst-coated semiconductor electrodes for solar water splitting.

Bingjia earned his Bachelor's degree in Building Environment & Energy Application Engineering from China University of Mining and Technology (2018). Currently he is working on thermal modeling to optimize extrusion-based additive manufacturing technologies.

Undergraduate Students

ERIKA BROWER

CONNOR BOERMAN

Erika is a Junior majoring in Mechanical Engineering and is working on performing electrochemical measurements to evaluate redox shuttle kinetics

Connor is a Freshman majoring in Mechanical Engineering and is interested in understanding and gaining experience with different methods of device prototyping, especially microfabrication, to study electrochemical reactions.