RIT - Department of Mechanical Engineering | People | Faculty

David Gee

Assistant Professor
Phone: 585-475-4237
E-mail: djgeme@rit.edu
Office: Room 3629, Building 17

Biography:

Prior to his faculty appointment in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at RIT, Dr. Gee served as a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Rochester where he collaborated on a project to investigate the physiological response of neutrophils during inflammation. The focus of his investigation was on the role of key adhesion molecules (selectins and integrins) and their interactions with the vasculature. During his postdoctoral appointment, Dr. Gee formulated and implemented an advanced computer simulation that models this response (DMAD).

Dr. Gee came to the U of R from The University of Texas at Austin where he was a Research Engineer and Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Technology. His research at UT included modeling of hypervelocity impact events during which the material response is dominated by impact pressures. While at UT, Dr. Gee guided undergraduate and graduate student research projects and was also involved in a University-wide program that provided mentoring to undergraduate minority students. His current teaching load includes courses in Thermodynamics, Fluid Dynamics, and Biomedical Computations. At UR, Dr. Gee was co-instructor for a BME graduate course (Fluid Flow in Microchannels) and guest-lectured extensively in an undergraduate course in Biomedical Computations. Dr. Gee holds a Ph.D in Mechanical Engineering from Boston University and an M.S. in Aerospace Engineering, also from BU. He received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering and Aeronautical Sciences Engineering (double major) from the University of California at Davis. Prior to graduate school, he was an engineering staff member at Raytheon Missile Systems Division, Bedford MA.

Dr. Gee’s research spans several diverse disciplines but is interconnected by the use of specialty programs and high performance computing (HPC). Many of the specialty software algorithms used in his research are custom written in FORTRAN. He is interested in advancing the state-of-the-art in inflammation modeling by developing and implementing advanced constitutive models within the deformable multiparticle adhesive dynamics (DMAD) simulation. These include a viscoelastic model and a liquid-drop model; both of which are capable of representing the large deformations that occur during the latter stages of the adhesion cascade. Throughout these stages leukocytes are in intimate contact with the endothelium and are constantly processing and integrating external and internal signals. When fully activated, leukocytes crawl in response to chemotactic gradients and may subsequently transmigrate across the endothelium into extracellular tissue. Experimental research is also necessary in order to validate numerical results. These experiments involve coating or functionalizing Petri dishes with human recombinant proteins and flowing neutrophils or functionally similar cells over the surface as a function of shear rate. Microscopy is used to visualize the cell interactions.

Dr. Gee also has research interests in shock physics. In this branch of physics, high-speed impacts (>2km/s) generate shock waves that dominate the material’s response to applied forces. Examples of hypervelocity impact include spacecraft orbital debris strikes, advanced kinetic energy penetrators, and cratering of planetary bodies. In research related to questions on the origins of life, it has been hypothesized that evidence of life (past or present) in the solar system would take the form of complex organic molecules (peptides) and could be present in surface regolith, surface ice, and/or subsurface ice, such as is known to exist on Europa (one of Jupiter’s moons). After the Earth, conditions on Europa are considered to have offered the best probability of initiating and/or sustaining life. These conditions include an energy source that generates heat (ie, dissipation of gravitationally induced stresses), the presumed existence of a liquid ocean beneath the surface ice, and volcanism. Using a state-of-the-art hydrocode, projectiles are designed and tested for impact properties (such as plume distribution). Orbiting instruments can subsequently analyze the ejected material for the presence of such molecules.