Principal Investigator – Dr. Serife Tol
Dr. Serife Tol is an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She received her Ph.D. (2017) from Georgia Institute of Technology and her M.S. (2012) and B.S. (2009) degrees from Middle East Technical University (METU, Ankara, Turkey), all in mechanical engineering. She worked as a Test and Analysis Engineer in the Defense Systems Technologies Business Sector at ASELSAN (Turkey, Ankara) between 2009 and 2012. During her graduate degree at METU she was elected as a M.S. fellow of the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey. Prior to joining UM in 2018, she was a visiting scholar in the Civil and Materials Engineering Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Dr. Tol’s research interests include smart structures, electromechanical systems, vibrations, energy harvesting, elastic wave propagation, nondestructive testing, metamaterials, metasurfaces, and phononic crystals. Dr. Tol’s research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, DARPA, the Department of Energy, and DoD-Office of Naval Research. Dr. Tol and her group were recipients of multiple awards, including ASME SMASIS 2016 Best Student Paper, ASME Best Paper in Energy Harvesting in 2017, Faculty Structured Outreach Support Fellow (2019), SPIE Smart Structures/NDE 2020 (2nd place), Alexander Azarkhin Scholarship (2021), SPIE Smart Structures/NDE 2022 (2nd place), Ivor K. McIvor Award (2022), and Elizabeth Caroline Crosby Faculty Grant (2023). More recently, Dr. Tol was awarded John F. Ullrich Education Excellence Award, which recognizes sustained excellence in curricular development, instruction, and guidance at all levels, impacting the experience of undergraduate and graduate students.