Ehsan Hajiesmaili
School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

Ehsan is a Ph.D. candidate in Materials Science and Mechanical Engineering at Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. With the support of Harvard MRSEC and supervised by Professor David Clarke, Ehsan has developed a new class of dielectric elastomer actuators which are capable of shape-morphing and reconfiguration (one individual actuator that can morph into several complex target shapes). To develop an analysis and design tool for these actuators, he has been collaborating with professors Katia Bertoldi, L. Mahadevan, Michael Brenner, and Chris Rycroft.

Before joining Harvard's Ph.D. program, Ehsan earned his B.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Shahrood University of Technology (Iran), and a double-degree Master of Science in Computational Mechanics from Polytechnic University of Catalonia (Spain) and École Centrale de Nantes (France). During his undergraduate and master's studies he developed a closed-form relation for second order recurrences (number theory), a device for volume measurement of arbitrarily-shaped objects using acoustic waves, a heuristic algorithm and codes for turbine blade balancing (in collaboration with Mashhad power plant), a molecular mechanics analysis tool to predict nonlinear behavior of coiled carbon nanotubes and their composites material (in collaboration with IFSTTAR Nantes), and a finite element analysis tool to study soft electromechanical systems (as part of his master thesis and as a visiting student at Harvard).