New Faculty Bios

It is our great pleasure to introduce you to just a few of our newest faculty:

Geoff Tsai joined the Department in March 2020 as a Lecturer PSOE, contributing to the Mechanical Engineering design program by leading design-focused classes for first-year, second-year, and third-year students. He received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering with Prof. Maria Yang at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, researching how engineers use tools such as sketching, prototyping, and CAD, as well as how those tools influence the design outcome in a product design and development process. He has received the Luis de Florez Award for Outstanding Ingenuity & Creative Judgment in Mechanical Engineering, James Dyson Foundation Graduate Fellowship for Design and Invention, and Carl G. Sontheimer Prize for Creativity and Innovation in Design. He is interested in early-stage design process, idea generation, creativity, and how products and people interact.

During his time in industry, he worked as a softgoods product designer at Apple. In the classroom, he has delighted in teaching toy product design for several years, and he is excited to continue teaching toy product design at UCSB, along with other classes covering laboratory experiments, modeling of mechanical systems, mechanisms, and manufacturing.

Adele Doyljoined the Department in July 2019 as an Assistant Professor affiliated with the Bioengineering and Systems Biology research area. She received her Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University with Dr. Robert Nerem, investigating how mesenchymal stem cells, a potential therapeutic cell source, respond to cardiovascular-relevant mechanical forces. She completed postdoctoral training at Harvard University with Dr. Sharad Ramanathan, developing methods to study how pluripotent stem cells make fate decisions. Her research focuses on decoding the molecular networks that cells use to make decisions, in particular the crucial role that physical cues play in developing and maintaining healthy tissues. Her work has applications in neural and vascular cell-based therapies.

Prior to her appointment as an Assistant Professor, Doyle was an Assistant Researcher with the Neuroscience Research Institute and Lecturer at the Center for Bioengineering at UCSB. She helped design the curriculum and teach courses for UCSB’s Bioengineering Graduate Emphasis, and is excited to continue teaching and research related bioengineering and mechanobiology.

Ryan Stowers joined the department as an Assistant Professor in September 2019. He graduated from Clemson University with a B.S. in Bioengineering. He then performed graduate research in the laboratory of Prof. Laura Suggs at the University of Texas at Austin, where he received his Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering. Dr. Stowers was a postdoctoral fellow in the Mechanical Engineering department at Stanford University in Prof. Ovijit Chaudhuri’s lab prior to joining UCSB. He was awarded a Ruth L. Kirschstein postdoctoral fellowship from the NIH and was recognized as a Young Investigator Award from the journal Cells, Tissues, Organs. At UCSB, the Stowers lab explores how cells interact with and are influenced by the mechanical properties of their environment. The group seeks to develop novel biomaterials for 3D cell culture to recapitulate key aspects of the cellular microenvironment and use those platforms to understand molecular mechanisms driving cell behavior. Prof. Stowers is also a member of the Center for Bioengineering and his laboratory is housed in the new Bioengineering Building on campus.

Yangying Zhu joined the Department in July 2019 as an Assistant Professor. She graduated from Tsinghua University with a B. Eng. degree in Building Technology where she studied thermofluids sciences for building thermal management. She received her Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she focused on understanding liquid-vapor phase change thermal transport at the small scale. She was a postdoctoral scholar in the Materials Science and Engineering Department at Stanford University, where she investigated microscopic effects of heat on battery degradation mechanisms. 

Her research lab at UCSB focuses on using thermo-fluid engineering approaches for future electronics and sustainable energy and water solutions. Her research combines fundamental understanding in heat and mass transfer with novel materials fabrication and characterization capabilities to address thermal management challenges of electronic devices, batteries, and electrocatalytic systems.