Monica Martinez Wilhelmus and Mauro Rodriguez have joined the engineering faculty at Brown University. Both hold appointments as assistant professors of engineering which began on July 1.
Martinez Wilhelmus comes to Brown from the University of California, Riverside where she has been an assistant professor since 2016. She is also an affiliated scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Prior to joining UCR, Martinez Wilhelmus held a one-year postdoctoral scholar position to work on a collaborative project between the Ocean Science group at NASA JPL and the Environmental Science and Engineering department at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
She received her undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering from the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM) in 2010, and her M.S. (2012) and Ph.D. (2016) degrees, both in mechanical engineering, from Caltech. Her research combines experimental techniques and numerical analyses to understand transport phenomena within the intersection of biology, oceanography, and fluid mechanics. She is a member of the American Physical Society, and the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology.
Rodriguez joins Brown from Caltech, where he was a Ford Foundation and National Science Foundation-Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate postdoctoral research fellow. He earned his doctorate in mechanical engineering from the University of Michigan in 2018, after earning his master’s degree in mechanical engineering from Stanford as a graduate engineering fellow in 2012. He received his B.S. with honors in mechanical science and engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2010.
Rodriguez’s research focuses on cavitation bubble dynamics with mass transfer in and near viscoelastic materials. He uses high-fidelity computational fluid dynamics to study wave and bubble dynamics in and near hard/soft materials relevant to medical (e.g., desired cavitation in ultrasound therapy tools to treat pathogenic tissues) applications. A native of the westside of Chicago, Rodriguez is passionately committed to increasing Latino/a participation across all levels of science, technology, engineering and math workforce pathways. He has served in several national leadership positions for the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers since 2009.