This one-year fellowship is in support of his Ph.D. research on “Load-Enhanced Methods for Lamb Wave in situ Nondestructive Evaluation of Complex Components” and will begin in July 2012. He also won a travel grant from the Force and Motion Foundation that will enable him to present his research at the 39th Annual Review of Quantitative Nondestructive Evaluation, which is being held this July in Denver, Colo.

A member of the Quantitative Ultrasonic Evaluation, Sensing, and Testing (QUEST) Laboratory, Mr. Chen is co-advised by ECE Professors Thomas Michaels and Jennifer Michaels. To date, his research has been supported by the Air Force Research Laboratory under a contract entitled “Understanding and Exploiting the Effects of Loading on Ultrasonic Sensing Systems for Structural Health Monitoring.” Thus far, Mr. Chen's work has significantly pushed the state-of-the-art in the development of in situ ultrasonic methods for damage detection, localization, and characterization over large areas of critical structures subjected to changing loading conditions.