Dan Cooper Asst. Professor of Mechanical Engineering

Dan received his bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in mechanical engineering from the University of Cambridge before completing a three year post-doc at MIT sponsored by Ford Motor Company. His research, which focuses on making impactful contributions to the areas of manufacturing and sustainability, considers multiple scales: identifying significant opportunities to cut emissions and/or costs by conducting large scale analyses on processes, factories and material supply chains, and pursuing a rigorous technical analysis in order to capitalize on the opportunities. Please explore our Research and Publications pages to learn more.
drcooper@umich.edu


Yongxian Zhu Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Yongxian received both the B.S. and M.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Purdue University. She recently completed her PhD in the ReMaDe group at the Univeristy of Michigan with a dissertation titled, "Carbon Abatement Options for U.S. Transport and Industry". Her research interests include refining technology raodmaps for metal recycling, data reconcilliation for resource maps, and transport emissions modeling.
yxzhu@umich.edu


Seyed Mohammadreza Heidari Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Mohammad received his bachelor’s in Water Engineering (University of Tabriz), master’s in Hydraulic (Sharif University of Technology), and Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering (Michigan State University). His research interests include industry decarbonization, sustainable energy, renewables, recycling, and circular economy.
heidari@umich.edu


Ala'aldin Alafaghani Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Ala'aldin received his bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Jordan before joining the University of California, Merced where he completed his master's and Ph.D. degrees. His Ph.D. research focused on improving the mechanical behavior of additively manufactured parts by optimizing the processing parameters and developing suitable post-processing routines. His research interests are reducing the design constraints for additive manufacturing, simulating the mechanical behavior of additively manufactured parts, and identifying innovative additive manufacturing application areas. He is currently working on eliminating the quench distortion in complex multi-hollow AA6082 profiles and improving the microstructure homogeneity, which will expand the envelope of allowable extrusion geometries, and reduce the scrap rate.
alaaldin@umich.edu


Greg Oberhausen PhD Student

Greg completed his bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). His research currently focuses on novel methods of reducing the scrap generated during metal extrusion.

oberhg@umich.edu






Jiankan Liao PhD Student

Jiankan completed his bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on uncertainty quantification and reduction using Bayesian techniques applied to environmental process modeling and material flow analysis.

jkliao@umich.edu


Alissa Tsai PhD Student

Alissa completed her bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering at Columbia University. Her research focuses on life cycle design for recycling of aluminum and advanced high strength steel automotive sheet metal.

alitsai@umich.edu



Sébastien Loreau PhD Student

Sébastien graduated in 2010 as an architectural engineer from the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium. After his graduation, he worked as a building services engineer and a sustainable construction consultant in different places, including Belgium and New Zealand. He started his PhD in 2021, with the project RESERVICE, investigating the feasibility and the effects of reusing building services in office buildings. It is an applied research project involving Prof. André Stephan at the University of Louvain (Belgium), Prof. Daniel Cooper at the University of Michigan (USA) and Anne-Laure Maerckx at the engineering company Cenergie (Belgium). The project is funded by Innoviris, which is the Brussels Region’s public institution for research and innovation.

sebastien.loreau@uclouvain.be


Ziqi Yin PhD Student

Ziqi completed her bachelor's degree in Global Management of Natural Resources at University College London. Her research will focus on developing the framework for determining a temporal hierarchy of technical recycling constraints and corresponding recvcling parameters.

ziqiy@umich.edu


Muhammad Umar Farooq PhD Student

Muhammad Umar is an incoming doctoral student at Resourceful Manufacturing and Design Group, University of Michigan Ann Arbor, USA. He has worked and/or studied in Pakistan, South Korea, United Kingdom, Slovenia, Netherlands and Sweden. He is a proud alumni of Europe’s most prestigious and flagship joint Erasmus Mundus program on Tribology of Surfaces at University of Leeds UK, University of Ljubljana Slovenia, University of Coimbra Portugal, and Lulea University of Technology Sweden. He has been awarded the President’s and Overall Performance Gold Medals at University of Engineering and Technology Lahore, Pakistan, one of the oldest engineering institute in the country. He has also been professionally affiliated with Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) as decision engineer. Similarly, he has industrial experience at Scania CV AB Sweden as Research Student, at SKF AB Netherlands as Software Engineering Trainee, and at NHS England UK as Data Engineer. His recent research interests and working area at UMich include exploring decarbonization opportunities for low carbon vehicle manufacturing in USA with the goal of reduce, reuse and recycle.

muf@umich.edu


Opeyemi Akinniyi PhD Student

Opeyemi obtained his bachelor's degree from the Federal University of Technology Akure, Nigeria, where he majored in efficient agricultural machine designs and development. He is interested in sustainable designs and manufacturing and an enthusiast of the SDGs 13 - Climate Action. He is joining the ReMaDe Lab as a PhD student with research interests in novel manufacturing tools for highly efficient metal processing, sustainable manufacturing roadmaps for industries and evaluation of environmental impacts of metal processing technologies.

akinniyi@umich.edu


Peter Fabe PhD Student

Peter earned both his bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering and master's degree in engineering from the University of Dayton with research and work focusing on design, manufacturing, education, and sustainable additive manufacturing. His current research will be conducting a comparative environmental and economic sustainability assessment of aluminum additive manufacturing processes to traditional aluminum manufacturing processes. He is co-advised by Professor Parth Vaishnav.

fabep@umich.edu


Zhuoer Li PhD Student

Zhuoer completed her bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering at University of Nottingham, Ningbo, China. Her research focuses on analyzing and increasing the sustainability of composite materials. She is co-advised by Professor Miki Banu.

lze@umich.edu


Jackson O'Connell Master's Student

Jackson O’Connell completed his bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His research involves creating cost, energy, and time models for 3D printed wind turbine blade molds to determine the feasibility of the new manufacturing process.

jackoco@umich.edu


Emma Laible Undergraduate researcher

I am a rising senior in the mechanical engineering department with a concentration in manufacturing. I will be helping with the extrusion quenching project and the clean sheet project.

elaible@umich.edu




Emily Pytell Undergraduate researcher

Emily Pytell is a rising junior in the department of Environmental Engineering. She works specifically with the polymer aspect of the project. She hopes to use her degree to keep plastic out of the oceans!

epytell@umich.edu






Jason Williams Undergraduate researcher

Jason Williams is a senior in the department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan. His research involves creating cost, energy, and time models for various methods of wind turbine blade manufacturing in order to determine the feasibility of novel techniques.

jasoncwi@umich.edu


Kobi Wettstein Undergraduate researcher

Kobi Wettstein is a senior in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan. His research involves investigating spring back in sheet metal forming to determine feasibility of techniques in reducing spring back in incremental sheet forming processes.

kwett@umich.edu


Former Members of the Lab


Nicole Ryan PhD Student

Nicole is a joint PhD student in Mechanical Engineering & School for Environment at Sustainability at the University of Michigan. Her research in the ReMaDe group centers on potential options for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in aluminum and steel production. She also earned a duel M.S. in Mechanical Engineering & School of Natural Resources and Environment at University of Michigan and a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering at North Carolina State University.
naryan@umich.edu



Kyle Syndergaard Master's Student

Kyle earned a bachelor's in mechanical engineering at Brigham Young University-Idaho with an emphasis in manufacturing. Prior to joining the ReMade group at the University of Michigan, he worked as a design engineer in a manufacturing facility where he was involved in every level of the prototyping, design and manufacturing of agricultural equipment. His research focuses on material efficiency in the U.S. steel sector, analyzing the opportunities for improvement and quantifying the potential enviromental and economic benefits.
synd@umich.edu


Lily Adams Undergraduate researcher

Lily Adams is a junior in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan. She is conducting materials analysis on production aluminum extrusions to see the effects on internal versus external material strength as a result of current industry quenching practices.

liladams@umich.edu




Roshail Gerard Visiting student from IIT Bombay

I am a student from IIT Bombay in Mechanical Engineering. I am working on novel, high material yield strategies for recycling machining scrap.

roshail.gerard@gmail.com


Boyuan Li M.S. researcher

I'm an M.S. student in the department of Mechanical Engineering. Currently, my research focuses on novel machine designs and tool paths in order to minimize incremental forming times.

liboy@umich.edu






Alycia Gerber Undergraduate researcher

Alycia Gerber is a rising junior in Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan. She is currently exploring patterns in embodied energy in relation to energy used for both large scale and small scale industry, from buildings to products. 

alyciaan@umich.edu



Jiawei Song Undergraduate researcher

I'm an undergraduate in the department of Mechanical Engineering and Aerospace Engineering. Currently, my research focuses on novel machine designs and tool paths in order to minimize incremental forming times.
jiaweis@umich.edu



Kevin Bao Undergraduate researcher

Ashvin Sharma Undergraduate researcher


Yizhou Tian Undergraduate researcher


Benjamin Samuel Master's researcher


Zekun Bian Master's researcher


Binyan Ding Master's researcher


Suraj Handithavalli Purushothama Master's researcher


Zeyu Xiong Undergraduate researcher


Dominique Tan-Ng Undergraduate researcher


Saima Jamal Undergraduate researcher


Austin Kassouf Undergraduate researcher


Jacob Wettstein Undergraduate researcher