Wonmo Kang

Associate Professor, School for Engineering of Matter, Transport and Energy, University of California, Irvine 

Wonmo Kang received his Ph.D. degree in 2012 with the Outstanding Mechanical Engineering PhD Award from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Then he moved to Northwestern University as a postdoctoral research fellow. In 2014, Dr. Kang won the American Society for Engineering Education-Naval Research Laboratory Fellowship and joined the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC as a leading research scientist. Since 2020, Dr. Kang has been an assistant professor in the School for Engineering of Matter, Transport and Energy at Arizona State University. His research expertise is in experimental mechanics with an emphasis on (1) metal-carbon composites for high temperature, high power, and high strength applications and (2) mechanically induced injury mechanisms for blunt injury prediction and prevention. His research work has been published in the leading scientific journals including Advanced Materials, Nano Letters, Advanced Functional Materials, ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, Small, Nanoscale and Trend in Biotechnologies. Dr. Kang is the recipient of several awards including the U.S. Air Force Research Lab Summer Faculty Fellowship, the postdoctoral fellowship from the American Society for Engineering Education, the Leidos technical publication awards, the FMC fellowship, the Frank & Marie Wheler fellowship, and the best poster awards at multiple professional conferences. In addition, he has attracted substantial research funding as a principal investigator throughout his academic career (>$3.6M allocated to Dr. Kang). He is an enthusiastic member of ASME’s NanoEngineering for Energy and Sustainability technical committee and a reviewer Board member for the Scientific Pages of Nanotechnology. He served as the principal symposium organizer at the 2019 and 2016 MRS spring meetings and the principal editor of the 2016 MRS proceedings on Soft Materials and Biomaterials. Similarly, he has acted as a reviewer for multiple journals and conferences.