Shima Shahab named Mary Virginia Jones Faculty Fellow in Mechanical Engineering

Shima Shahab, associate professor of mechanical engineering in the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech, has been named the Mary Virginia Jones Faculty Fellow in Mechanical Engineering by the Virginia Tech Board of Visitors.

Established in 2019, the Mary Virginia Jones Faculty Fellowship acknowledges and rewards early career faculty who have shown exceptional promise in research, teaching, or outreach.

A member of the Virginia Tech faculty since 2015 and based in the greater Washington, D.C., metro area, Shahab has demonstrated an exemplary passion for teaching and research. She founded the Multiphysics Intelligent and Dynamical Systems (MInDS) Laboratory, which has received approximately $3.8 million in funding with roughly $2.8 million specifically for MInDS’s lab, including a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development award in 2022 and Early Concept Grant for Exploratory Research award in 2021. She recently received the Gary Anderson Early Achievement Award from American Society of Mechanical Engineering, honoring a rising star researcher who has made significant contributions to the field of adaptive structures and material systems.

Her research group has become an innovative team of multiple postdoctoral researchers; 13 graduate students, most of whom are Ph.D. candidates; and 20 undergraduates with more than 35 papers in leading journals and 65 conference presentations.

Shahab's expertise includes structural dynamics and wave propagation in ultrasound-responsive intelligent material systems that address cutting-edge research problems including contactless ultrasound power transfer systems, acoustic holograms for revolutionary ultrasound treatments, nonlinear acoustic materials, and ultrasound-responsive polymeric systems, among others.

Shahab received her bachelor’s degree from University of Kerman, Iran, and a master’s degree and Ph.D. from Georgia Tech.

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