M3 Lab @ IIT Madras Department of Mechanical Engineering

People

We are actively looking for motivated undergraduate, graduate (Masters/PhD) and post-doctoral candidates to join our team! If you would like to join us, please contact Prof. Sakhalkar (siddheshsakhalkar1992@gmail.com) and include your CV with research interests. We welcome researchers from diverse backgrounds including mechanical engineering, civil engineering, applied mechanics, mathematics, computer science, data science & AI and related fields.

Principal Investigator

Prof. Siddhesh Sakhalkar

Prof. Siddhesh Sakhalkar

Assistant Professor
Department of Mechanical Engineering
Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras

Bio

Dr. Siddhesh Sakhalkar is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, where he leads the Mechanics, Modeling and Machine Learning (M3) Lab. His research focuses on developing theoretical frameworks, numerical models and machine learning methodologies to understand and predict the mechanical behavior of complex engineering systems across multiple length scales, from macro to micro and nano.

Dr. Sakhalkar holds a B.Tech. in Mechanical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology Bombay and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. He has seven years of industry experience, including five years as a Mechanical Simulation Engineer at Western Digital in San Jose, USA, and two years as a Mechanical Static Engineer at Shell in Bangalore, India.

During his doctoral research, conducted under the supervision of Prof. David Bogy, Dr. Sakhalkar developed numerical models to study nanoscale lubricant flow, air bearing dynamics, interfacial forces and heat transfer at the head-disk interface in hard disk drives. At Western Digital, he utilized advanced computational techniques and machine learning/statistical tools to optimize the structural design and dynamics of next-generation hard disk drives. He is a recipient of the John and Janet McMurtry Fellowship, The Otto and Herta F. Kornei Endowment Fund Fellowship and the ASME 28th Conference on Information Storage and Processing Systems Best Paper Award. His full CV can be found here.

Current Students

This could be you!

This could be you!