Weldon School Welcomes Three New Faculty Members
The growth of BME faculty is in alignment with the College's strategic initiative, announced in fall 2012, to grow the College of Engineering over the next five years by as many as 107 new faculty—an increase of 30 percent.
Shelley Claridge received her B.S. in mathematics, biochemistry and genetics at Texas A&M University in 1997, and her Ph.D. in chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley in 2008.
Most recently, she was an NIH postdoctoral fellow and Merkin Family Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles. A central theme of her research is the development of integrated imaging strategies that advance the limits of single-molecule structural analysis on the 0.1–10 nm scale, addressing challenges ranging from understanding protein structure to optimizing nanoscale device performance. Her research incorporates three main thrusts. First, development of custom scanning probe instrumentation and sample preparation strategies enables imaging of samples not traditionally amenable to scanning probe characterization (including large proteins). Next, unconventional applications of bioanalytical techniques leverage recent advances in the synthesis of layered materials, such as graphene. Finally, integrated modeling and advanced imaging address issues in single-molecule structural analysis of complex molecules, including finding solutions to inverse imaging problems.
Taeyoon Kim received his B.S. in mechanical engineering at Seoul National University in 2004, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in mechanical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2007 and 2010, respectively.
Most recently he held a postdoctoral position at the Institute for Biophysical Dynamics at the University of Chicago, developing and using state-of-the-art computer simulations to compute macroscopic dynamics of actin networks from realistic nano-scale representations of their constituents. At Purdue, Kim is developing a research program to address central problems in biomechanics: the microscopic origins of acto-myosin contractility and cellular viscoelasticity and mechanotransduction. He is the principal investigator for the Molecular, Cellular, and Tissue (MCT) Biomechanics Laboratory, which studies diverse mechanical behaviors of biological matter, using cutting-edge computational models that span subcellular levels to the cell and tissue levels.
Zhongming Liu received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from Zhejiang University in China in 2000 and 2003, respectively. He received his Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from the University of Minnesota at Twin Cities in 2008.
Before joining Purdue, he was a research fellow in Advanced MRI within the Laboratory of Functional and Molecular Imaging at the National Institutes of Health. His primary research interest is the development and application of innovative imaging methods (such as MRI, EEG, MEG and ECoG) to study brain function and anatomy. He has recently made significant progress in developing a novel fMRI-EEG integrated-imaging technique for mapping comprehensive neural networks in the human brain.