Wilkins Aquino

Professor in the Thomas Lord Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science

Wilkins Aquino obtained a BSCE from Purdue University, and a MS and PhD in Civil Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Before joining the Duke Faculty, he was an associate professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Cornell University. He was also a member of the fields of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics and Applied Mathematics at Cornell.

Prof. Aquino has broad interests in computational mechanics, including finite element methods, computational inverse problems, uncertainty quantification, coupled chemo-mechanics, and computational acoustics, among others.

Appointments and Affiliations

• Professor in the Thomas Lord Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science
• Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
• Professor in Head & Neck Surgery & Communication Sciences
• Professor of Mathematics

Contact Information

• Office Location: 309 Gross Hall, Durham, NC 27708
• Office Phone: +1 919 684 1922
• Email Address: wilkins.aquino@duke.edu
• Websites:
  • Inverse Problems and Optimization in Mechanics Lab

Education

• Ph.D. University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 2002

Research Interests

Computational mechanics, finite element methods, computational inverse problems and their applications in engineering and biomedicine, scientific computing, computational acoustics and acoustics-structure interaction, coupled chemo-mechanics (e.g., electrochemistry-mechanics).

Awards, Honors, and Distinctions

• Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program. National Science Foundation. 2012
• Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program. National Science Foundation. 2007

Courses Taught

• ME 591: Research Independent Study in Mechanical Engineering or Material Science
• ME 555: Advanced Topics in Mechanical Engineering
• ME 491: Special Projects in Mechanical Engineering
• ME 490: Special Topics in Mechanical Engineering
• EGR 393: Research Projects in Engineering

Representative Publications

• Zhao, Y; Parlak, Z; Yu, W; French, D; Aquino, W; Zauscher, S, Microfluidic QCM enables ultrahigh Q-factor: a new paradigm for in-liquid gravimetric sensing., Microsystems & nanoengineering, vol 10 no. 1 (2024) [10.1038/s41378-024-00732-2] [abs].
• Aquino, W; Desmond, J; Eldred, M; Kurzawski, A; McCormick, C; Sanders, C; Smith, C; Walsh, T, Assessing decision boundaries under uncertainty, Structural and Multidisciplinary Optimization, vol 67 no. 7 (2024) [10.1007/s00158-024-03832-9] [abs].
• Aquino, W; Rouse, J; Bonnet, M, Active design of diffuse acoustic fields in enclosures., The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, vol 155 no. 2 (2024), pp. 1297-1307 [10.1121/10.0024770] [abs].
• Baek, Y; Aquino, W; Mukherjee, S, Generalized Bayes approach to inverse problems with model misspecification., Inverse problems, vol 39 no. 10 (2023) [10.1088/1361-6420/acf51c] [abs].
• Chen, MJ; Sivakumar, K; Banyay, GA; Golchert, BM; Walsh, TF; Zavlanos, MM; Aquino, W, Bayesian Optimal Sensor Placement for Damage Detection in Frequency-Domain Dynamics, Journal of Engineering Mechanics, vol 148 no. 12 (2022) [10.1061/(ASCE)EM.1943-7889.0002162] [abs].