I am an Assistant Professor in the Leslie A. Rose Department of Mechanical Engineering at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology. I received a Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in August 2016. After finishing my Ph.D., I joined the Department of Mathematics at Louisiana State University as a Postdoctoral Fellow and worked on numerical methods and analysis of the peridynamics theory of fracture. I then moved to the Oden Institute at UT Austin to gain experience in the computational mechanics of multiphysics and complex systems.
My research interests include solids and granular media mechanics, fracture mechanics, multiphysics and multiscale modeling, and applications of neural networks to engineering problems. I am serving the Journal of Peridynamics and Nonlocal Modeling as one of the associate editors, the Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS) as topic editor, and I am an Editorial Board Member of Scientific Reports.
PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering, 2016
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA
ME in Mechanical Engineering, 2012
Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India
BE in Mechanical Engineering, 2010
Govt. Engineering College, Raipur, India
We are excited to welcome Dr. Aalok Jha to Computational Engineering Analysis and Design (CEAD) Lab at South Dakota Mines as a Postdoctoral Fellow. Dr. Jha has a PhD from IIT Kanpur (Aerospace Engineering) and specializes in finite element modeling and mechanics of materials. Prior to joining our group, Dr. Jha worked at Johns Hopkins University as a Postdoctoral Fellow.
A huge thank you to the National Science Foundation (NSF) for the ERI award (link)! The awarded amount is $200k over two years.
This project will focus on developing an Adaptive Multi-Fidelity Framework for Modeling Heterogeneous Materials Under Extreme Conditions. We will be pushing the boundaries of how we simulate granular media like sand and rocks under intense stress. The attached video shows a glimpse of our work with the PeriDEM model!
Thrilled to share some exciting news! Our lab at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology has been awarded two new grants to pursue cutting-edge research in computational materials science. The first one is from NSF; see NSF award news.
Congratulations to Ian. This award will allow Ian to work on the design of functional materials during the summer 2025.
