About
Dr. Chalivendra obtained his undergraduate degree and masters degree from Sri Venkateswara University College of Engineering, Tirupati, India in 1993 and 1997 respectively. He worked for two different industries: Bharat Electronics Ltd., and Tata Refractories Ltd., for two and half years in India before pursuing his doctoral degree at University of Rhode Island during 2000-2003. His doctoral dissertation was focused on analytical and experimental treatment of fracture studies in functionally graded materials. He developed analytical crack tip field equations for an arbitrarily oriented crack in functionally graded materials under both stationary and transient dynamic loading conditions. As a postdoctoral fellow at California Institute of Technology during 2003-2005, he conducted experimental investigation of well-controlled dynamic fragmentation studies for validation of large-scale simulations. He joined UMass Dartmouth in 2005 and is now serving as a Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department. He has published more than 100 peer-reviewed journal articles and is currently serving as a Technical Editor for the Experimental Mechanics journal. He was awarded about $4.5M external grant funding for conducting research to understand materials behavior under various loading conditions at different length scales. He graduated twenty five masters students and four doctoral student from his research lab. He also trained more than 50 undergraduate students in his research lab and published about 25 peer-reviewed articles with them as co-authors. His research interests include, multi-functional composite material, biological/soft materials, nano-mechanical characterization polymers, high strain rate behavior, and impact characterization of sports helmets.