Since joining the Department of Mechanical Engineering in September 2007, Shriram Pillapakkam, Ph.D., associate professor, has served a vital role in the College of Engineering. In addition to teaching courses such as Machine Design, Kinematics of Machinery and Computational Fluid Dynamics, Dr. Pillapakkam also serves as the graduate coordinator for the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the coordinator for the Women’s Engineering Exploration (WE2) program. Additionally, he has served in several mentoring and advising roles, such as mentoring Temple University students re-engineer a third-generation kidney dialysis machine, a project designed to give undergraduate students a hands-on design experience.

“To teach, advise and mentor students across the spectrum – from high school students just discovering engineering to students completing doctoral work in a specialized engineering discipline is a unique opportunity that I find really rewarding,” explains Dr. Pillapakkam about the numerous roles he serves in the college.

Dr. Pillapakkam earned his Ph.D. from the New Jersey Institute of Technology. His research interests include manipulation of particles adsorbed at fluid-fluid interfaces, development of efficient computational approaches for multiphase fluids, and the fluid dynamics of non-Newtonian fluids. He has published in journals, such as the Journal of Fluid Mechanics and Journal of Computational Physics. Dr. Pillapakkam also is a past recipient of the Young Engineer Award from the American Society of Mechanical Engineering.