Jonathan B. Estrada

Research Fellow, University of Michigan
Mechanical Engineering

Bio

I am a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan. My current research involves experimental full-field techniques aimed at in vitro mechanical characterization, fatigue, and failure analysis of soft materials and tissues, such as the anterior cruciate ligament in the knee. I’m interested generally in connecting mechanics to soft material/tissue deformation and failure, ranging from fatigue damage of ligaments to blunt- and blast-induced traumatic brain injury at a cellular level.

Curriculum Vitae

View my complete CV here.

Professional Appointments

University of Michigan

Research Fellow, Mechanical Engineering, 2017-present
Research Advisor: Ellen Arruda

Education

Brown University

Ph.D., Solid Mechanics, 2017
Sc.M., Solid Mechanics, 2013
Research Advisor: Christian Franck

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

B.S., Materials Science and Engineering, 2011
Research Advisor: Krystyn Van Vliet

Teaching Philosophy

My teaching philosophy is simple - engineering, like any good structure, has a solid personal foundation with tiers of increasing refinement over years of education. To maximize the potential of our future engineers, we need to focus separately on the needs of primary, secondary, and post-secondary students.

It’s imperative to get (and keep!) kids excited about science from a young age. From running demonstrations for Kindergarteners about the wonders of liquid nitrogen to simply reading science books to preschoolers at Gretchen’s House here in Michigan, I care greatly about fostering good science fundamentals among not just those who will be our future engineers and scientists, but every individual student.

While in high school, a lecture series in Cosmology taught by a grad student was one of the formative, convincing experiences for my career in academia. Thus, I have a personal drive to keep high school programs strong, which I’ve done by not only designing and sole-teaching five summers of classes, but additionally team-revamping the engineering curriculum for Summer@Brown in 2015 to create a modular, multi-week engineering program for high school students. In 2016, I redesigned and instructed a semester-long Introduction to Engineering partnership with the Lincoln School to center around design and prototyping.

At the college level, serving as a recitation instructor twice a week for two semesters of 3.091 - Introduction to Solid State Chemistry as a senior at MIT was the affirming moment of my academic path. Since then, I’ve been a teaching instructor for the entire continuum of first-year engineers to graduate students, finding particular purpose in debugging Matlab code with frustrated students and designing/constructing experiments and labs. However, learning is not, nor should be, restricted the class environment, and so I’ve founded/organized two seminars - the Continua Research Society at Brown, aimed as an informal weekly seminar series for Solids/Fluids/Materials graduate students, and the MPACE Postdoc Seminar Series here at Michigan.

Current Research

Understanding how and why biological tissues ranging from the brain to ligaments become damaged during injurious events centers on two principal thrusts - understanding and modeling complexity of these biological tissues and experimentally testing them at relevant strain rates.

To date, my research has focused on cell injury criteria in injurious events such as inertial microcavitation bubbles in, and rapid compression of, neural cell cultures, and is presently expanding to in vitro testing (and subsequent constitutive modeling) of ligaments using magnetic resonance imaging.

Selected publications

(1 = These authors contributed equally.)

  1. Estrada JB, Barajas CR, Henann DL, Johnsen E, Franck C (2018). High strain-rate soft material characterization via inertial cavitation. Journal of the Mechanics and Physics of Solids 112, 291-317.

  2. Bar-Kochba E, Scimone MT, Estrada JB, Franck C (2016). Strain and Rate-dependent Diffuse Axonal Injury Pathomorphology of 3D Neuron Cultures Under Compression. Scientific Reports 6(30550).

  3. Estrada JB1, Bar-Kochba E1, Stout DA1, Toyjanova J, Kesari H, Reichner J, Franck C (2016). Mean deformation metrics for quantifying 3D cell-matrix interactions in the absence of material properties. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113(11).

  4. Estrada JB, Franck C (2015). Intuitive interface for the quantitative evaluation of speckle patterns for use in digital image and volume correlation techniques. Journal of Applied Mechanics 82(9).

Selected awards

Professional Affiliations