Elisabeth Smela

Dr. Elisabeth Smela, associate professor of mechanical engineering, is committed to education through teaching, course development, curriculum innovation, and mentoring. She has developed three new courses, including a two-part MEMS course, and a graduate course in active polymers. To enable educational institutions without microfabrication facilities to give lab demonstrations on the basic fabrication concepts, Dr. Smela is working with a group of students to create MEMS teaching kits. Undergraduates who wish to pursue research have been welcome in her laboratory, and graduate students have the opportunity to present their research at a college-wide biweekly MEMS seminar series that she created and organizes. While at Maryland she has established research activities in bio-sensing, has continued her work on conjugated polymer actuators (developing commercial biomedical devices as well as physics-based models of the actuation mechanisms) and she has started a new effort in miniaturization of dielectric elastomer actuators for use as artificial muscles. She was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers for this effort.