New Faculty Appointments

The Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering is pleased to welcome Professor Marco Panesi to our faculty. He received his Ph.D. in aerospace engineering from the von Kármán Institute for Fluid Dynamics (Belgium) and the University of Pisa, Italy. He completed postdoctoral training at the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences at UT Austin and at NASA Ames Research Center as part of the Predictive Science Academic Alliance Program (PSAAP). Professor Panesi began his academic career at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), where he became professor of aerospace engineering and founded the Center for Hypersonics and Entry System Studies (CHESS), serving as its director. Professor Panesi’s research lies at the intersection of plasma physics, fluid dynamics and high-performance computing, with a focus on non-equilibrium chemically reacting flows in hypersonic environments. He has led the development of advanced collisional-radiative and radiation transport models in collaboration with NASA, integrating quantum chemistry, uncertainty quantification and multiscale modeling to enable predictive simulations of extreme aerothermodynamic phenomena. His work has been recognized through several prestigious honors, including the Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship, the NASA Early Career Faculty Award, the AFOSR Young Investigator Award and the European Space Agency’s Award for Contributions to the Fundamentals of Aerothermodynamics. At UCI, he will continue advancing the frontiers of hypersonics by addressing fundamental scientific challenges through predictive modeling and physics-based simulation.

The Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering welcomes Professor Kelly Stephani to our faculty. Professor Stephani received her Ph.D. in aerospace engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 2012, and was a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Michigan in the Department of Aerospace Engineering. She then joined the faculty of UIUC in 2014 where she co-founded and served as associate director for the Center for Hypersonics and Entry Systems Studies. She is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and serves in multiple advisory roles including the National Academies Board on Army Research and Development, and Sandia National Laboratories Engineering Sciences Research Foundation External Review Board. Stephani is an associate fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and she is recipient of numerous awards including the NASA Early Career Faculty (ECF) Award, AFRL Summer Faculty Fellowship in 2015, AFOSR Young Investigator Program (YIP) Award in 2017 and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 2019. Professor Stephani's expertise includes hypersonics and high-temperature aerothermodynamics, surface chemistry and material response, kinetic methods for non-equilibrium reacting flows, and kinetic theory and transport processes. Her research activities and collaborations engage stakeholders across government, industry and academia.