Benjamin A. Jasperson
University of Southern California

Los Angeles, CA
I am a Postdoctoral Scholar - Research Associate in Professor Krishna Garikipati’s Computational Physics Group at the University of Southern California. I recently received my Ph.D. in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics with a Data Science & Engineering graduate concentration from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (advisor: Professor Harley Johnson). I was also a member of the DIGI-MAT program.
My research focuses on optimizing designs and computational models to solve mechanics-based problems. My recent projects include work in topology optimization as well as atomistic methods (interatomic modeling). I’m especially interested in using data-driven methods and machine learning in solving these problems. Although my current research is focused on computational methods, I did experimental research (design, fabrication and testing) during my Master’s degree program.
I received my Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in mechanical engineering from the University of Wisconsin - Madison (advisors: Professor Frank Pfefferkorn and Professor Kevin Turner). I also worked for ~10 years as a design engineer on products ranging from healthcare devices to neutron generators. I am a Professional Engineer (P.E.) in the State of Wisconsin.
news
Jan 6, 2025 | Our recent work exploring the use of fundamental microscopic properties as predictors of large-scale quantities of interest has been accepted for publication in Acta Materialia! You can find the article here. |
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Jan 4, 2025 | I’m excited to announce that our recent work exploring cross-scale covariance for material property prediction has been published in npj Computational Materials. This work is the result of a wonderful collaboration between the University of Minnesota (Ilia Nikiforov, Ellad Tadmor), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (Amit Samanta, Fei Zhou, Vincenzo Lordi, and Vasily Bulatov), and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. You can find all the details in our article, here. |
May 28, 2024 | If you are heading to EMI/PMC 2024 in Chicago this week, please stop by the Buckingham Room on Wednesday, May 29 at 11:30am. I will be presenting our recent work, as seen in MRS Advances. As a part of the talk, I will describe how we transitioned our dual neural network topology optimization algorithm to aid in fitting interatomic potentials. This initial proof-of-concept work could eventually be used to aid in efficiently fitting an interatomic potential for large scale properties of interest, e.g. grain boundary energy and plastic flow strength. |
Apr 4, 2024 | I’m excited to share our recent article, which extends our neural-network based optimization framework to interatomic potentials. You can find the article, which was recently published in MRS-Advances, here |
Mar 8, 2024 | Our recent work with Michael Wood was highlighted in the Sandia National Laboratories Collaboration Report for 2022-2023. You can see the article here, pg 58-59. I have truly enjoyed being a part of this great collaboration! |
Dec 9, 2023 | I’m excited to share our work using neural networks to perform topology optimization. You can find the article, which was recently published in Computer-Aided Design, here |
Jul 28, 2023 | Thank you to the organizers at USNCCM17, where I just presented our topology optimization work. It was great to meet everyone and hear about all of your research. I’m looking forward to USNCCM18 in Chicago! |
Jul 10, 2023 | I’m excited to be included as a Mavis Future Faculty Fellow for 2023-2024: MechSE announcement |
selected publications
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A Dual Neural Network Approach to Topology Optimization for Thermal-Electromagnetic Device DesignComputer-Aided Design, Dec 2023
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Thin film heat flux sensors fabricated on copper substrates for thermal measurements in microfluidic environmentsJournal of Micromechanics and Microengineering, Dec 2014