Author Archives: dpreston

PhD student Rawand Rasheed has been awarded the Smalley Curl Institute’s Student Training for Advising Research award and the Liu Idea Lab for Innovation and Entrepreneurship’s Rice Innovation Fellows award.

Our review paper describing a data-driven analysis of the field of soft robotics, led by PhD student Barclay Jumet and in collaboration with Dr. Vanessa Sanchez, has been published in Advanced Intelligent Systems and featured in Rice’s news.

Our work revealing the self-similarity of virus inactivation, led by Faye Yap in collaboration with Zhen Liu and coworkers at UTMB, has been published in the Journal of Hazardous Materials and highlighted in Futurity.

PhD student Marquise Bell has been awarded an NSTGRO Fellowship supported by NASA. This four-year fellowship will support his research on lightweight, multifunctional materials to enable the next generation of spacesuits.

Our paper describing the effect of daily temperature fluctuations on virus lifetime, led by Faye Yap, has been published in Science of the Total Environment. We show that high diurnal temperature ranges can decrease virus lifetime.

Aman Eujayl has been awarded Best Oral Presentation out of 20 presenters in the School of Engineering for her talk at the 2021 Rice Undergraduate Research Symposium on self-powered wearables for mobility assistance.

Incoming PhD student Tyler Martin has been awarded the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. This fellowship will support his research in the PI Lab after he completes his BS in mechanical engineering at Lamar University.

Second-year PhD student Rawand Rasheed has been awarded the IBUILD Graduate Research Fellowship supported by the US Department of Energy. This fellowship will support his research on high-efficiency dehumidification.

A Focus article authored by postdoc Anoop Rajappan and PhD student Barclay Jumet has been published in Science Robotics. We describe a pathway toward soft, untethered, autonomous robots and highlight recent work.

A paper led by collaborators Amit Nagarkar and Won-Kyu Lee has been published in PNAS. We show an amphibious morph-bot that can crawl on land or swim in water using a reversible conical buckling instability.