Cara AC Leckey Author

Dr. Sourav Banerjee

Dr. Sourav Banerjee is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of South Carolina (UofSC), Columbia, South Carolina, USA. He is currently serving as a Director of the Integrated Material Assessment and Predictive Simulation Laboratory (i-MAPS) at UofSC since 2012. Before joining UofSC Dr. Banerjee served as Senior Research Scientist and then Director of Product Development in Acellent Technologies Inc. during 2008 and 2011. Dr. Banerjee’s research is focused on Ultrasonic and Acoustic waves while catering to multiple fields including, experimental and computational NDE, structural health monitoring (SHM), design and analysis of multifunctional metamaterial wave guides, energy harvesting from acoustic waves and noise barriers and ultrasonic wave based biomedical device applications. Dr. Banerjee has published more than ~120 research articles out of which more than ~55 are in peer reviewed international Journals. He has authored three book chapters and one book related to his research area on ultrasonics. Dr. Banerjee is very interested in computational NDE that he recognizes has potential to solve many autonomous inspection challenges in the future generation NDE inspections. Dr. Banerjee has given research and academic lectures at multiple countries including, Germany, Italy, China, India, Russia, Malaysia to name a few. He works with many industries and government agencies around the world. He is the recipient of structural health monitoring (SHM) Person of the year award 2019 awarded at the Stanford University during IWSHM 2019 and the Breakthrough Star award awarded by the Office of Vice President of Research at the UofSC in 2019. Not only research, Dr. Banerjee is a passionate about teaching. His innovative teaching methods for new smart phone generation students has made them more engaged during the class and helped them learn through practical engineering problems. For his innovative teaching method for large classes, he received Michael J. Mungo Teaching Award, the higher teaching award at UofSC in 2017.

Dr. Banerjee is serving as an executive committee member for the ASME NDPD division, committee member for the SPIE Smart Structure and NDE conference etc. He is serving as a symposium organizer on the topic related to NDE at the ASME IMECE conference since 2016. He serves in the editorial board of Scientific Reports published by Nature Publishing Group, International Aeronautics Journal, International Journal of Aeronautics and Aerospace Engineering etc. Dr. Banerjee also serve as an advisory board member of the Journal of Nondestructive Evaluation, Diagnostics and Prognostics of Engineering Systems, published by ASME.

Dr. Banerjee received Ph.D. in Engineering Mechanics and Applied Mathematics from University of Arizona, Tucson, USA, M.Tech in Structural Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay, India and the B.E. in Civil Engineering from the Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technology (IIEST), Shibpur, formerly known as Shibpur BE College, India.

Dr. Cara A.C. Leckey

Dr. Cara A.C. Leckey is currently the Deputy Branch Chief for the Nondestructive Evaluation Sciences Branch at NASA Langley Research Center. She has been a physicist in the Nondestructive Evaluation group at NASA Langley since 2010, with a research focus on computational NDE. During her time at NASA, Dr. Leckey has led a variety of computational NDE focused projects, including research on the development and optimization of NDE simulation codes and the use of NDE simulation to solve aerospace inspection challenges; as well as multidisciplinary work focused on the optimization of high performance computing code for several of NASA’s scientific/engineering software tools. Her work often involves collaboration with academia, industry, and other government agencies. Dr. Leckey is the recipient of the NASA Early Career Achievement Medal and the NASA Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate Associate Administrator’s High Potentials Award. She previously served as a subtopic manager for NASA’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program for a topic on focused on computational NDE. She currently serves as an Associate Technical Editor for the journals Materials Evaluation and Research in NDE. Dr. Leckey received Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in physics from the College of William and Mary, and a B.S. in physics from University of Mary Washington.