Personnel

Laboratory Director

Dr. Spulak is an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. He received his B.S. from the University of Notre Dame, and his M.S. and Ph. D. from The Ohio State University. His research has included investigating material strain rate sensitivity, stress-state dependent fracture, adiabatic heating response of materials subjected to dynamic loading, behavior of additive manufactured materials, metal plasticity, fiber reinforced composite materials, coupled mechanical-thermal-electrochemical response of batteries subjected to low rate and dynamic loading, and investigation into the deformation, damage, and ignition response of polymer bonded explosive materials.

Email: nathan.spulak@uah.edu

Graduate Students

George (Mike) Winter

Mike is pursuing his Ph.D., and his research focuses on developing a robust, accurate method to determine the full-field stresses across a material surface using DIC measurements that does not require the use of a user selected constitutive model beforehand. Such constitutive models can artificially constrain the solution and cause inaccuracies. Therefore Mike is working to develop a novel method that can calculate these stress field based solely upon fundamental physics principals and widely applicable assumptions on the material response.

Benjamin Solomon

Benjamin is pursuing his M.S. degree, and his research is centered on investigating the deformation and failure behavior of polymer bonded explosive (PBX) materials when subjected to dynamic loading under a variety of different applied stress states.

Undergraduate Students

Alumni

Graduate Alumni

Elias Gerstein

Elias Gerstein obtained his M.S. degree in 2025, and prior to that had worked in the E3M lab as an undergraduate through the university RCEU program. Elias was also a part of the UAH Joint Undergraduate Master's Program (JUMP). His research project was sponsored by NASA, and involved characterizing the strain rate sensitivity of woven fiber reinforced composite materials, for use in the next generation of eVTOL aircraft under a variety of tension, compression, and shear loading conditions.

Joel Barnes

Joel obtained his M.S. degree in 2025 and was part of the UAH JUMP program. His research focused on developing a novel method for determining the full-field stresses on materials utilizing full-field strain data measured with DIC, without the need for a pre-selected constitutive model to relate the stresses and strains.

Sydney Resnick

Sydney obtained her M.S. degree in 2025 and her research investigated the strain rate sensitivity of numerous aerospace alloys of interest to NASA for use with spaceflight applications.

Derryk Daignault

Derryk obtained his M.S. in 2025. His research involved developing novel high strain rate test techniques to enable material deformation to occur under truly constant strain rates, even once strain localization and necking begins. He did additional research investigating how to utilize the Virtual Fields Method (VFM) to obtain full-field stresses on material specimens during split-Hopkinson bar testing.

Abigail Schauer

Abigail obtained her M.S. degree in 2025, and her research involved the experimental testing and numerical modeling of batteries. Specifically, she investigated coupled mechanical, thermal and electrochemical response when they are subjected to deformation at various different loading rates.

T. Elias Marler

Elias obtained his M.S. degree in 2024 through the E3M Lab. His research investigated the high strain rate behavior of additively manufactured 316L stainless steel, specifically focusing in the effects that post-build heat treatments have on the material rate sensitivity.

Undergraduate Alumni

Tyler Robertson

Tyler joined the E3M Lab as part of UAH's Summer 2024 Research and Creative Experiences (RCEU) program. He assisted in performing FEA simulations to design novel high rate tests that deform at truly constant true strain rates, as well as performed mechanical testing at low rates of a new shear test design for fiber-reinforced composite materials.

Josiah Hrenyk

Josiah worked in the E3M laboratory through the UAH MATRIX scholarship program as well as through the COE Undergraduate Research Project (URP) program. He helped in designing a novel test method for inducing metal fracture under combinations of tension and hydrostatic compression loading, as well as evaluated methods for temperature sensing and performing tests at elevated temperatures.

Andrew Baumgardner

Andrew obtained his undergraduate Honor's College thesis based upon the research work done in the E3M Lab, as part of the Summer 2023 RCEU program. He designed, fabricated, and performed proof of concept tests on a novel method of inducing pure shear loading on fiber reinforced composites at elevated strain rates.

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