Profile

Education:

• Sc.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2003
• Ph.D.,Tsinghua University, China, 1999
• B.S., Tsinghua University, China, 1994

Research Areas and Descriptors

Mechanics of Materials; Mechanical behaviors of soft active materials; experimental characterization and modeling of nonlinear thermoviscoelastic behaviors of polymers; polymer physics and mechanics; photo-mechanics of light activated polymers; finite deformation constitutive modeling; nonlinear finite element analysis; soft tissue mechanics;

Background

Dr. Qi will join Tech in January, 2014. Currently, he is an associate professor at University of Colorado Boulder. Prior he was a postdoctoral fellow at MIT.

Research

Dr. Qi’ research focuses on the finite deformation multiphsyics modeling of soft active materials, their finite element method implementations and applications to design problem. The material systems include: shape memory polymers, shape memory elastomeric composites, light activated polymers, covalent adaptive network polymers, arterial tissues. Particularly, he is interested in understanding and modeling the evolution of material structure and mechanical properties of these materials under environmental stimuli, such as temperature, light, etc. To assist understanding of mechanical properties, his group routinely conducts thermomechanical or photo-mechanical experiments. Constitutive models developments are typically based on the observations from these experiments. The ultimate goal of the constitutive models is to integrate them with finite element through user material subroutines so that these models can be used to solve complicated 3D multiphysics problems involving nonlinear mechanics.