Retirements & New Faculty

Retirements

The Mechanical Engineering Department is celebrating the work of six retiring faculty members.

Andrew Davol

Davol served as a professor at Cal Poly since September 1999. Prior to that, he worked at Boeing Co. as a structural design and stress analyst. He is a Cal Poly alumnus, receiving a Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering. Davol earned a master’s degree and Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego.

His research interests include design, composites, stress analysis, tissue engineering and bicycle design.

Thomas Mackin

Mackin has worked as a professor at Cal Poly since 2005 and served as the chair of the Mechanical Engineering Department from 2005 through 2008. His goal was to extend research more broadly into the undergraduate curriculum, create entrepreneurial engineering options for undergraduate students and expand startup opportunities for undergrads. He developed a Center for Collaborative Engineering Research and Education in conjunction with the University of California, Santa Barbara to provide research opportunities for faculty and undergraduate students. He also started a robotics company, Synbotics, which was staffed with Cal Poly undergraduate engineering students and has helped student teams create start-ups. He currently serves as an engineering design consultant at Cal Poly’s Center of Innovation and Entrepreneurship and as an adjunct faculty member in the Center for Homeland Defense and Security at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, where he teaches Critical Infrastructure Protection.

Tom Mase

Mase joined the Cal Poly Mechanical Engineering Department in January 2007. He is currently a professor of mechanical engineering and Cal Poly’s Faculty Athletic Representative, or FAR, overseeing academic integrity, institutional control and student-athlete well-being. Mase received a Bachelor of Science degree in mechanical engineering from Michigan State University in 1980. He obtained master’s and doctorate degrees from the University of California, Berkeley in 1982 and 1987, respectively. At Michigan State, he played on the golf team and was co-captain his senior year.

Most of his career has been in academia, using his mechanics background to work on applied problems in golf and sports in general. Mase stepped out of academia a couple of times to work full time on research and design in the golf industry. He continues to consult with the golf industry on research and design and is named on six U.S. and two Japanese golf-related patents. Every fall, Mase serves as a scientific panelist on Golf Digest’s Hotlist.

Joe Mello

Mello is a mechanical engineering professor with interests in composites and structural systems and stress analysis. He came to Cal Poly to have an impact on student career paths. Highlights of his career include learning with design teams and seeing his former students become lead engineers.

Saeed Niku

Niku recently completed his five years of the Faculty Early Retirement Program after over 40 years of teaching at Cal Poly in the Mechanical Engineering Department. Niku came to Cal Poly in January 1983 and has taught 15 classes in mechanics, design and robotics. He has published textbooks in design, robotics and general engineering subjects. He was also the graduate adviser of the department for 23 years.

Niku taught a multitude of subjects over the years, and many of his senior project students developed devices for the disabled, some with national attention. His research focused on robotics and related subjects. His graduate students developed countless new devices for a variety of purposes, including walking machines, robot creatures, vision routines, a 7-degreeof-freedom “monkey” robot, animatronic lips, skin sensor, Stewart platform-type parallel robot and many more. Three of his graduate students also developed finger-spelling hands for communication with blind-deaf individuals.

Mohammad Noori

Noori joined Cal Poly in 2005 as the dean of the College of Engineering. Prior to that, he was the Reynolds chaired professor and head of mechanical and aerospace engineering at North Carolina State University and held the position of liaison professor at the National Institute of Aerospace (NIA) and the director of NIA programs at NC State.

Since 2010, Noori has been a professor of mechanical engineering at Cal Poly and has enjoyed teaching several courses and advising numerous senior design projects, many of which revolve around sustainable development issues. He is also the executive editor of a major journal, and has served as the associate editor, academic editor and member of the editorial board for more than 16 other journals.

Noori has made original contributions in the development of analytical models for the prediction and analysis of complex hysteresis behaviors observed in dynamic response of structural and mechanical systems and in electromagnetic fields. His smooth hysteresis model, known as BWBN, the first model to predict shear pinching, has been highly cited in the topic’s literature. Throughout his career, Noori has authored over 300 refereed publications. Noori is a fellow and life member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and had the honor of being invited as a national expert by President Clinton’s Special Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection in 1996.

New Faculty

The Mechanical Engineering Department has welcomed four new faculty members.

Amanda (Johnston) Emberley

Emberley joined Cal Poly during fall 2020 as a part-time lecturer and started as an assistant professor in mechanical engineering in fall 2022. Prior to Cal Poly, she was at Purdue University where she received a Ph.D. in engineering education. She also has a bachelor’s degree in biomedical engineering and master’s degree in education, both from UC Davis. Her research is focused on improving the understanding of teaching and learning of engineering, currently focused on developing teaching materials to contextualize mechanics teaching and working to understand how students conceptualize design.

Behnam Ghalamchi

Ghalamchi received his master’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Zanjan and a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from LUT University. He has certifications in data analysis, data visualization and databases and structured query language. He has worked as instructional faculty at Cal Poly since 2019 and joined as an assistant professor of mechanical engineering in August 2022.

Mohammad Hasan

Hasan has a bachelor’s degree from Jordan University of Science and Technology in mechanical engineering with a focus on mechatronics. For his graduate studies, he worked on a combination of robotics and sensor technologies, earning a degree from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. He remained at the university for an additional two years, earning his Ph.D. in mechanical and materials engineering, where he focused on implementing machine learning using microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) in a nondigital manner using the dynamics of MEMS for calculation.

His work currently focuses on nontraditional robotics and machine learning and self-learning robots. He is working with a group of undergraduate students on an origami robotics project. An origami work design project was also approved for funding through the Summer Undergraduate Research Program.

Alan Zhang

Zhang joined Cal Poly as an assistant professor of mechanical engineering in fall 2022. He received his B.S. (2016), M.S. (2018) and Ph.D. (2022), all in mechanical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. While in graduate school, he worked as a researcher at NASA Ames Research Center and Squishy Robotics, a spinoff startup based on his lab group’s work.

While his prior work focused on designing impactresistant tensegrity structures for use as planetary landers, his current research interests are on leveraging the inherent strength and flexibility of tensegrities in the development of assistive medical devices to augment human dexterity. He is particularly interested in exploring innovative, sustainable and low-cost designs that are accessible to all members of the community. n