New Faculty Virginia Tech's College of Engineering 2008-2009

dynamics, mechanochemical coupling phenomena within the
cells, and the techniques that researchers use to study them.
Behkam brings with her an accomplished and varied
background in engineering; both in academia and industry.
While working on her master’s degree, she characterized the
thermal transport properties of giant magnetoresistive (GMR)
head constituents using electrical resistance thermometry
techniques. Her master’s work was recognized for excellence
and was adjudged as the best poster at Carnegie Mellon’s
annual Bennett Conference in 2002. For several years, she
was a research engineer at Iran Center of Industrial Research
and Development in Tehran, where she worked on developing
propriety software for design and testing of automotive break
systems.
Among her publications, she is the co-author of a book
chapter on “Bacteria Integrated Swimming Micro-robots” in 50
Years of AI. Her research work in bacterial propulsion of swimming
micro-robots has been featured in New Scientist, Discovery
News, and Discovery Science Channel.
She has served as a reviewer for the IEEE Transactions
on Robotics, IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology,
IEEE International Conference on Biomedical Robotics
and Biomechatronics, IEEE/RSJ International Conference on
Intelligent Robots and Systems, and for the IEEE Conference
on Automation Science and Engineering.
Tomonari Furukawa received his
bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering
(ME) from Waseda University, Japan,
in 1990, his master’s in mechatronic engineering
from the University of Sydney,
Australia in 1993, and his Ph.D. in quantum
engineering and systems science from the
University of Tokyo, Japan, in 1996.
He remained at the University of Tokyo
after receiving his doctorate. He was a research
associate from 1995 until 1997, and
Furukawa
then a lecturer from 1997 until 2000. In 2000, Furukawa moved
to the University of Sydney where he remained for two years
as a U2000 research fellow. In 2002 he moved to the School of
Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering at the University of
New South Wales (UNSW) working as a lecturer and became
a senior lecturer in 2004.
Furukawa’s research focuses on inverse analysis and optimization
in robotics and computational mechanics. At UNSW
he was Director of the Computational Mechanics and Robotics
Laboratory, supervising various research projects in areas including
cooperative control of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV),
micro UAVs, composite materials characterization, damage
identification and research into flapping wings.
He has held a visiting research fellow appointment with
the Australian Centre for Field Robotics, University of Sydney,
since 2002. For two months in 2003 he was a visiting scholar
at Tohoku University’s Department of Aerospace Engineering.
For six months in 2006 he was a visiting fellow at the Center of
Computational Material Science, Naval Research Laboratory,
Washington D.C.
Among his awards, he received the Japan Society of
Mechanical Engineers Young Investigator Award for 2000. In
2004, he earned the Asian-Pacific Association on Computational
Mechanics’ Young Investigator Award for Computational
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