Dr. Matt Allen, University of Wisconsin-Madison / Brigham Young University
Matt Allen is a Professor in the Engineering Mechanics program in the department of Engineering Physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and will soon be the newest member of the faculty at Brigham Young University. He received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from BYU, M. S. and PhD degrees from the Georgia Tech in 2005 and was a post-doc at Sandia National Laboratories. He’s also a member of the Loads and Dynamics technical discipline team in the NASA Engineering and Safety Center. He enjoys playing sheep’s head (Bavarian card game) with his former students at international conferences, eating frozen custard and almost anything to do with mountains.
It can be overwhelming to start out as a new graduate research assistant. You are given a desk and expected to create new knowledge or invent new technologies or to do experiments that nobody has ever done before. In this talk I reflect on some of my experiences performing research in structural dynamics over the past twenty years, highlighting some of the lessons learned and some of the technological advances that my research group has had a part in.