Yaling Liu, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor (CV)
Dr. Yaling Liu received his Ph.D. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Northwestern University in 2006. From July 2006 to July 2007, he was with the Mechanical Research and Development Center, Seagate Technology as a senior engineer, working on heat-assisted magnetic recording head for hard drives. Dr. Liu has been with the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, The University of Texas at Arlington since September, 2007 as an assistant professor.
Dr. Liu's primary research interest is fluid-structure interaction at the micro/nano scale and in biological systems. Dr. Liu has developed novel immersed finite element and molecular dynamics based numerical methods for the simulation of biological and nanoscale systems. His methods have been used in several applications at the bio-nano interface, including design and optimization of Electric Field Guided Assembly (EFGA) of nanowires, linking blood rheology and viscoelasticity to the underlying blood cell aggregation, characterization of flexible valve-viscous fluid interaction and dynamics of an artificial heart. Another research area that Dr. Liu is interested in is nanofluidics, i.e., determining liquid flows through nanoscale devices. He has been using molecular dynamics and parallel computing to study the slip dynamics at solid/liquid interface and diffusion of liquids/biomolecules in nano-channels. Currently, Dr. Liu's research projects are aimed at combining electrohydrodynamic, biological, nanoscale computational techniques to study fluid-structure interaction problems in biological and nanoscale systems, for the purpose of designing better cardiovascular implants and lab-on-chip devices.