This call has closed. It was for a PhD student starting Spring 2026, in Mechanical Engineering at South Dakota Mines. Both directions below are still live in the group, so the description is kept here; write to ask what is open now.
Mechanics of granular and heterogeneous materials. A multi-fidelity simulation framework, built on PeriDEM, for materials with rich mesoscale structure such as concrete and metal–ceramic composites, resolving inclusion fracture, matrix cracking and interfacial debonding together rather than through an effective law. Applications run to infrastructure durability, armor and protective systems, and advanced manufacturing.
Mechanics and design of functional soft materials. Multiscale models for hard-magnetic and dielectric soft materials that link microscale interactions, particle anisotropy, imperfect bonding and dipole–dipole effects, to macroscale response, with neural-operator surrogates being investigated to reduce the cost of repeated solves while keeping prediction error under control.
Who we are looking for
- A strong background and genuine interest in engineering mathematics, finite element methods and solid mechanics.
- Scientific programming in Python and C++, either already strong or strongly motivated to become so.
- An interest in working at the intersection of mechanics, computational modeling and applied mathematics.
Write to prashant.jha@sdsmt.edu. Details on the application process are with South Dakota Mines Graduate Admissions. Our code is public at github.com/prashjha and github.com/CEADpx.