Assistant Professor, Engineering Department, University of Massachusetts Boston

Joanna B. Dahl, Ph.D., earned a B.S. in mechanical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2007. She earned a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 2013 under the supervision of Prof. David B. Bogy. During the pursuit of her doctorate, Dr. Dahl simulated the mechanics at the critical head-disk interface of a hard disk drive and provided product-level predictions of the performance for the emerging heat-assisted magnetic recording technology. From 2013-2015, Dr. Dahl served as an NSF postdoctoral research fellow under the mentorship of Profs. Susan J. Muller (Chemical Engineering) and Sanjay Kumar (Bioengineering) at the University of California, Berkeley. There she developed a microfluidic platform to quantitatively study the mechanics of microscale soft bodies. In the fall of 2016, Dr. Dahl joined the new Engineering Department at the University of Massachusetts Boston as an Assistant Professor. Her research program is in experimental biomechanics. Projects include measuring the stiffnesses of extracellular vesicles and cells with applications for cancer biology, developing viscoelastic measurement techniques using microfluidics, and investigating synthetic vesicle biophysics.