MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (6/20/24)—The Department is pleased to welcome Assistant Professors Anabel Del Val, Yue Yu and Damennick Henry as its newest faculty members!
Fluid Mechanics
Before joining AEM, Anabel del Val held the position of Postdoctoral researcher at the von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics, where she investigated gas-phase chemistry for hypersonic environments with stochastic technique. Her Stochastic Hypersonics Research Group works to advance the understanding of hypersonic flows by successfully applying stochastic methods to advance the state-of-the-art models, simulations and experiments.
Aerospace Systems
Yue Yu is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin. He received his Ph.D. in Aeronautics and Astronautics from the University of Washington in 2021. He received the 2023 AIAA Guidance, Navigation, and Control Best Paper Award. He helped develop the optimization-based guidance software for the NASA Safe and Precise Landing-Integrated Capabilities Evolution system. Yu's research focuses on developing efficient and scalable algorithms for controlling autonomous systems in aerospace engineering. His work centers on numerical optimization and control theory, extending to various domains such as game theory, machine learning, and network systems. Recent research projects include real-time trajectory optimization and game-theoretic coordination in multiagent systems, with an emphasis on applications in advanced air mobility and spacecraft control.
Damennick Henry, an alumni of the University of Minnesota, received his PhD from the University of Colorado where he was a NASA Space Technology Research Fellow and Smead Scholar. As a research fellow, Damennick has been a visiting technologist at a variety of NASA centers including Johnson, Goddard, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He is currently a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Colorado where he is working on fundamental problems in astrography, a field that seeks to provide a geographic description and visualization of space. More broadly, his research seeks to develop geometric theory and computational techniques to uncover order in chaotic dynamical environments that the next generation of spacecraft will operate in.
Assistant Professors del Val and Yu will begin their positions Fall of 2024. Henry will start in the Fall of 2025.
