MechSE graduate students Kothari and Mishra awarded fellowships from FMC Technologies

6/19/2012 By Linda H. Conway

Shrenik Kothari and Surya Mishra MechSE graduate students Shrenik Kothari and Surya Mishra have recently been named as recipients of FMC Technologies Inc. Fellowships. Each will receive $10,000 for the 2010-2011 academic year. They were selected by a committee representing FMC, the University of Illinois, and the University of Illinois Foundation.

Written by By Linda H. Conway

Shrenik Kothari and Surya Mishra
Shrenik Kothari and Surya Mishra
Shrenik Kothari and Surya Mishra

MechSE graduate students Shrenik Kothari and Surya Mishra have recently been named as recipients of FMC Technologies Inc. Fellowships. Each will receive $10,000 for the 2010-2011 academic year. They were selected by a committee representing FMC, the University of Illinois, and the University of Illinois Foundation.

Shrenik Kothari

Kothari will be a second year Master’s student this fall. His Master’s thesis work, under the supervision of MechSE professor David Saintillan, is in collaboration with a group of researchers who have used a unique nanofabrication method to design catalytic nanomotors intended to eventually perform intricate tasks at the cellular level, and which have been observed to exhibit characteristic motions. The research aims to theoretically interpret, model and simulate the dynamics of the fluid-structural interactions involved by using the method of Regularized Stokeslets. It is hoped that their findings will facilitate enhanced control of these nanomotors and lead to the design of functional machinery at these scales.

Kothari came to UIUC from Calcutta, India and earned an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur.

Surya Mishra

Mishra is a Master’s student working under the supervision of MechSE professor Andreas Polycarpou. His research interests are in the field of tribology—the study of friction, wear and lubrication. His work with Polycarpou is focused on surface coatings with superior tribological performance at high temperatures for use in air conditioning compressors.

Mishra received an undergraduate degree in manufacturing engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur in 2008. He worked for a year as a manufacturing engineer at Schlumberger Stonehouse Technology Centre, UK, before coming to UIUC in 2009.

Currently he is doing a summer internship in the Mechanical and Tribological Systems Laboratory at GE Global Research, Bangalore, India, looking at the effect of soot contaminated lubricant on the wear of journal bearings and developing methods to measure oil film thickness in the bearings.

FMC Technologies Inc Scholarship Fund

The FMC Technologies Inc. Scholarship Fund was originally established as the Link-Belt Educational Fund in 1963 by U. of I. alumnus Bert A. Gaymon, a Link-Belt executive. Gaymon, a Champaign native who earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering in 1897, spent his entire career with Link-Belt in Chicago. He was an anonymous donor to the fund until a year before his death in 1973. Link-Belt merged into FMC Corp, which eventually became FMC Technologies Inc. The fund now provides about $110,000 annually for undergraduate scholarships and graduate fellowships.


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This story was published June 19, 2012.