Featured Faculty Member: Dr. David Chelidze, URI

OCTOBER 31 2021 | Dr. David Chelidze, Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics, was introduced to NIUVT by Co-Director Dr. Arun Shukla, and has provided valuable contributions as a part of NIUVT’s Structural Integrity, Vibration, and Control research team. “My research mainly focuses on vibration-based structural health monitoring, nonlinear system identification and model order reduction, fatigue diagnosis and prognosis under irregular loading, and multivariate time series analysis,” explained Dr. Chelidze. “I have collaborative projects with many UConn faculty and industry partners. I have known UConn faculty member Dr. Jiong Tang for a long time; since we were working on our respective Ph.D’s at Penn State. It was exciting to have an opportunity to work with Jiong and Rich Christenson on projects that interest all of us and have important naval applications.”

Students who graduate from Dr. Chelidze’s Nonlinear Dynamics Lab continue to pursue careers in academia, work in industry such as Google, Raytheon, or Sanesta, or in government laboratories such as NUWC. “In the age of machine learning, I believe it becomes even more important to focus on physics-guided data or model reduction, system identification, feature extraction, and classification,” said Dr. Chelidze. “The approaches we are developing in the Nonlinear Dynamics Laboratory will be instrumental in facilitating smart and targeted applications of dynamical systems perspective to naval structures and systems.”