We are thrilled to welcome Lucas Meza to UW as an assistant professor in mechanical engineering and NanoES faculty member. Meza's research will focus on the connection between small-scale material phenomena and large-scale mechanical properties in natural and engineered materials with the specific goal of using nanoscale architecture as a design tool to create new materials with novel mechanical properties.
Meza comes to the UW from the University of Cambridge where he was a research associate studying the micromechanical behavior of 3D woven fiber composites. Previously, he was at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where he worked on ultralight, hierarchical metamaterials composed of nanoscale ceramics that attained high strength and had the capacity recover after significant compression.
His work has been featured in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science and Nature Materials, and he was given the Robert W. Cahn Paper of the Year Award in 2014 by the Journal of Materials Science.
Meza received his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Caltech in 2016. He holds a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles ('11).
Learn more about Meza's research on his lab website.