Bogdan Popa
Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering
Popa has worked for the last 15 years on novel the design, fabrication and characterization of metamaterials and metamaterial-enabled devices. His research interests revolve around studying wave phenomena in complex structures and leveraging this knowledge to manipulate waves in new and interesting ways. To this end he has experimentally demonstrated unique passive and active metamaterial-based beamformers, metamaterial-enabled passive acoustic holography, and metamaterial-enabled compressive sensing devices, the first broadband acoustic cloaking devices in air, and the first metamaterials exhibiting strong dynamic mass anisotropy. He pioneered various optimization methods to design and characterize new materials. For instance, he used convolutional neural networks to obtain all the material parameters of complex material samples. Popa’s group has the expertise to study the interaction of electromagnetic and acoustic waves with matter using an array of numerical simulation tools including Comsol Multiphysics and in-house code. His lab is equipped with a computational server that can run large scale simulations in Comsol Multiphysics.