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Modern engineered systems are becoming increasingly complex, presenting new challenges and opportunities for engineers. These systems inherently involve the deep coupling of multiple physical fields—mechanics, chemical reactions, mass transport, and biophysics—to achieve desired functions in various environments. Advanced manufacturing now enables such couplings across multiple length scales, from the nanoscale to the macroscale. Moreover, many systems involve heterogeneous materials and multiphase interactions, adding further layers of complexity. As a result, designing, assessing, and controlling these systems, as well as refurbishing, reusing, and recycling them at their end-of-life, demand new approaches that can interpret and manage their intricate multi-field behaviors.
Our research group advances multi-field science to develop new methods and technologies that decode system complexity for sustainability, reliability, and security. Under this broad vision, we pursue diverse topics including mechano-electrochemical analytics, automated characterization of materials and structures, and AI-driven discovery in mechanical sciences and engineering.
The group’s Principal Investigator, Juner Zhu, has a strong record of industrial collaboration addressing real-world challenges such as sheet metal forming, crashworthiness of EV batteries, battery swelling and degradation, and non-destructive assessment of energy storage systems. Over the past years, these efforts have been supported by leading companies including Apple, AVL, Hyundai, John Deere, Ford, Glimpse, LG Energy Solution, Murata, Saint-Gobain, SES.AI, Shell, Tesla, Toyota, and VW/Audi/Porsche. Building on this foundation, we are now transforming these research successes into commercial products and standardized techniques through spin-out ventures.
Currently, our group is interested in the multi-field science of coupled systems—exploring how one physical field can be modeled, inferred, and controlled through the measurement and interpretation of another, by integrating physics-based theory with data-driven learning.
Updates
Our group just received the Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) award from NSF! 03/13/2026
Rongyue Lin passed her PhD oral qualification exam. Congrats! 03/09/2026
Juner joined the editorial board of Journal of Solid State Electrochemistry. 02/03/2026
Juner visited Tesla and delivered an invited seminar. 01/16/2026
MS student Gavin Lin joined our group for MS thesis study. 01/15/2026
Juner joined the early-career editorial board of Extreme Mechanics Letters. 12/30/2025
Our collaborative paper with Professor Yijin Liu's group at UT Austin on battery particle dynamics is now online in Science! 12/18/2025
Our paper on battery swelling is online today in Journal of Power Sources! The work was led by Junning in collaboration with LGES and Stony Brook University. 11/7/2025
Our paper on MEIS is online today in Joule! 11/3/2025
Juner joined the Advisory Board of Cell Reports Physical Science, a Cell Press journal. 10/23/2025
Dr. Jun Huang from FZ Julich/RTWH Aachen visited our group for three weeks and delivered an excellent seminar in the department! 10/21/2025
Juner was awarded the ECS-Toyota Young Investigator Fellowship at the 248th Electrochemical Society Meeting in Chicago! 10/13/2025
Dr. Royal Ihuaenyi was awarded the Future Faculty Fellowship at the Society of Engineering Science (SES) meeting in Altanta! 10/13/2025
Undergraudate student Tina Jiang received a PEAK Base Camp Fellowship to work with us to develop computational code for battery analytics! 09/12/2025
Our undergraudate student Nathan Lim received a PEAK Summit Fellowship to work with us on the flow of electrolyte in porous electrodes! 09/12/2025
We welcome Xinyu Yang and Kaile Peng to our group as PhD students! 09/04/2025
Please stay tuned to our new preprint: Learning Reaction-Diffusion Kinetics from Mechanical Information. 08/24/2025
NSF CMMI supports our research on "CDS&E: Mechanics Informatics for Learning Constitutive Models: Theory, Computation, and Uncertainty Quantification"! 07/01/2025
Xinran passed the Qulification Exam and became a PhD Candidate. Congrats! 04/04/2025
Amin passed the Qulification Exam and became a PhD Candidate. Congrats! 04/01/2025
We farewelled Dr. Ruqing Fang to start his career in the battery industry! 03/20/2025
Our paper led by Dr. Jihun Song has been accepted by Energy & Environmental Science! 02/04/2025
Please check out our recent preprint on 'Mechanics Informatics'! 01/25/2025
We successfully co-organized the 3rd Battery Sustainability Workshop at MIT with the Bazant Group and the Braatz Group! 12/06/2024
We welcome Dr. Yonglin Huang to our team as a postdoc! Yonglin will greatly diversify our research with his excellence in battery manufacturing and material characterization. 11/15/2024
Our undergraduate researcher George Vassilakis is named one of the prestigious Huntington 100! 11/7/2024
Our project "EVEREMORE" led by Saint-Gobain has been selected by ARPA-E for funding through the CIRCULAR Program! 11/8/2024
Junning received the 2024 John and Katharine Cipolla Graduate Merit Award! 10/30/2024
Dr. Dong Zeng, Principal Research Scientist at FM Global delivered a great talk in our EV Power Seminar. 10/10/24
Postdoctoral research Dr. Jihun Song joined Hyundai Motor Group! Congrats! 10/01/2024
PhD student Xinran Shi joined our group. 08/26/24
Juner received the ECS Toyota Young Investigator Fellowship. 08/20/2024
PhD student Rongyue Lin (co-advised by Prof. Ruobing Bai) joined our group. 08/19/2024
We launched a new research project with LG Energy Solution to develop electro-chemo-mechanical models for battery swelling. 08/15/2024
Dr. Saleh Nabi, Principal AI Researcher at Schneider Electric talked about physics-informed AI in our second EV Power Seminar. 08/08/24
Undergraduate student, Julian Halpern-Smith joined our group. He will work on battery pressure control. 08/06/24
Ruqing and Wei published our group’s first JMPS paper on solid-state batteries. 07/27/2024
Undergraduate student, Tyler Davidson joined our group. He will work on battery degradation study. 07/22/24
Visiting undergraduate student from Tsinghua University, Chaofan Chen joined our group. He will work on machine learning and its applications on batteries. 07/17/24
Dr. Kang Xu, Chief Scientist at SES AI Corporation, kicked off our group's first EV Power Seminar. 07/12/2024
Our group received the Ford URP Award for EV battery cell modeling research! 06/20/2024
The CBS Steering Committee Meeting was successfully held at MIT. 06/13/2024
New paper "Rapid Simulation of Electro-Chemo-Mechanical Deformation of Li-ion Batteries Based On Porous Electrode Theory" is online in the Journal of Electrochemical Society. 05/28/2024
At the 245th ECS Meeting, Ruqing and Junning delivered an oral and two poster presentations on behalf of our group. 05/28/24
Royal won the best lightening talk award at NEW.Mech 2024! 05/24/24
Amin was selected to participate in the ARPA-E Student Summit! 05/22/24
New paper "Seeking the most informative design of test specimens for learning constitutive models" in EML is online. Congrats Royal for your first journal paper with the group! 05/21/24
Royal received a postdoc fellowship to participate in the Cell Symposium on EV 2024! 05/20/2024
Our new paper in Extreme Mech Letters, entitled "Microstructure-chemomechanics relations of polycrystalline cathodes in solid-state batteries", is online. 04/25/2024
Our group alumnus, Sophie Fallon, will continue her education through the Erasmus Mundus Master in Membrane Engineering program. Congrats, Sophie! 04/ 23/2024
Master student, Divya Priya Dhanraj joined us. She will work on a research project on batteries in low temperatures. 04/ 23/2024
Junning will start her summer internship at Tesla from May to the end of summer! 03/15/2024
Invited by Prof. Ruobing Bai, we contributed to the Journal Club of iMechanica for February 2024, on the topic of the mechanics of solid-state batteries. Here is the link. 02/01/2024
Saint-Gobain colleagues visited us and discussed battery research with our whole group. We are very grateful for their gift fund to support our research! 1/25/2024
We start our new year by welcoming a new PhD student, Amin Kazem Ghamsari, to join our group to work on data-driven methods for electro-chemo-mechanics! 1/2/2024
Our group successfully organized the 2nd Battery Sustainability Workshop on the Innovation Campus of Northeastern Univ. in Burlington! 12/6/2023
Northeastern junior student, George Vassilakis, joined our group as an AJC Merit Research Fellow! 11/3/2023
Our undergraduate student Nitin won the Northeastern PEAK Experience Base Camp Award! 10/24/2023
Junning passed her Oral Qualifying Exam today after an impressive presentation and a professional Q&A session. Congrats on becoming a PhD candidate! 10/18/2023
Dr. Jihun Song, joined our group as a Postdoctoral Associate! 10/02/2023
Sophie Fallon started her research project with us. 09/22/2023
NEU undergraduate students, Vishhal Shashi Kumar and Jiaqing Chen, joined our group for research training. 09/16/2023
Junlin completed his 2-month visit in our group! During his visit, Junlin developed a method of using the concept of "joint entropy" to quantify the amount of information conveyed in a mechanical test. 9/15/2023
Dr. Ruqing Fang joined the group as a Postdoctoral Associate! 09/01/2023
Our paper on Phase-field DeepONet is published and online! This is Wei's second first-author paper in the prestigious journal CMAME. Congrats, Wei! 8/10/2023
Dr. Royal Ihuaenyi joined the group as a Postdoctoral Associate! 08/01/2023
Dr. Zhu co-founded the Center for Battery Sustainability with Profs. Martin Z. Bazant and Richard D. Braatz! We are now accepting industrial members.
Dr. Zhu is awarded the Haythornthwaite Foundation Research Initiation Grant by ASME Applied Mechanics Division.
Dr. Wei Li will join Northeastern as an Associate Research Scientist, starting 01/01/2023!
Junning Jiao joined the group! She will be our first PhD student. 09/02/2022
Dr. Zhu officially joined Northeastern Univ. today! 08/22/2022
Acknowledgments
As researchers, our biggest sponsors are always our families. We would like to thank them for their unconditional support!
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