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 (ssakhalkar@iitm.ac.in) 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
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 develops numerical methods and scientific machine learning models to understand and predict the mechanical behavior of complex engineering systems across macro-, micro-, and nanoscale regimes.
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
Chirontan Bhuyan
Ph.D. student, IIT Madras
Research Interests: fluid mechanics, scientific machine learning
Henrik Lind
External Undergraduate Researcher, University of Minnesota, Duluth
Jointly advised with Prof. Richard Davis, University of Minnesota, Duluth
Research Interests: scientific machine learning, computational science, computer graphics
Aditi Vaidya
Undergraduate Student, IIT Madras
Jointly advised with Prof. Abhishek Sinha, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR)
Research Interests: scientific machine learning, constrained online convex optimization, applied mathematics
Ameya Pandey
Undergraduate Student, IIT Madras
Research Interests: scientific machine learning, fluid mechanics, robotics
Akshith Nair
Undergraduate Student, IIT Madras
Research Interests: scientific machine learning, structural mechanics
Lalith Sharavanan
Undergraduate Student, IIT Madras
Research Interests: scientific machine learning, fluid mechanics, heat transfer
Ritvik Ghosh
Undergraduate Student, IIT Madras
Research Interests: scientific machine learning, fluid mechanics, aerodynamics
Arjun Arunachalam
Undergraduate Student, IIT Madras
Research Interests: scientific machine learning, applied mathematics, structural dynamics
Bhagwat Makwana
Undergraduate Student, IIT Madras
Research Interests: scientific machine learning, fluid mechanics, robotics