B.A., Kalahandi College, India
M.A., Sambalpur University, India
M.A., Ph.D., SUNY at Stony Brook

Mili Shah received her PhD from the Computational and Applied Mathematics Department at Rice University. Prior to arriving at The Cooper Union in 2018 she was an associate professor at Loyola University Maryland. She has received external grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). She currently is working with NIST on calibration and registration problems which have applications in computer vision, manufacturing, and robotics.

Dirk M. Luchtenburg is associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at The Cooper Union. His research interests include dynamics and control. He leads the Dynamics and Control Lab at Cooper Union, where undergraduate students develop model-based controllers for smart vehicles, such as quadcopters and ground robots.

Luchtenburg received his MS degree in Aerospace Engineering from the Delft University of Technology located in Delft, Netherlands. Subsequently, he received his PhD degree in Fluid Mechanics from the Berlin Institute of Technology (TU Berlin) where he studied under Bernd Noack and Rudibert King. After spending three years as a post-doc and lecturer at Princeton University under Clancy Rowley, he joined the Cooper Union as a research fellow in 2013, followed by a visiting assistant professorship. He was appointed full-time faculty member in Mechanical Engineering in 2015. His interests span the fields of fluid mechanics, dynamics, and control.

He has a broad range of specializations including fluid flows, dynamics, and feedback control. He has applied these interests to a range of applications including active flow control of fluids, nonlinear aerodynamic stall models, model reduction and identification of fluid flows, and control of smart vehicles.

Dr. Stella Banou received her Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from Northeastern University in 2022. Her research in intra-body communications for wearable and implantable devices sparked an interest in neural applications, which she pursued as a postdoctoral researcher at NYU’s Center for Neural Science. There, she investigated multi-sensory neural circuits and designed neural, behavioral, and physiological data collection systems for animal experiments with rodents and non-human primates. Her work focuses on developing low-power wireless biosensing systems for health applications, including wearable devices and neural data recording technologies. 

As an educator and mentor, Dr. Banou is committed to engaging students in active, project-based learning that emphasizes teamwork and creativity. She aims to get students excited and involved in creating healthcare solutions that make a real-world impact, encouraging them to see engineering as a way to improve lives locally and globally. At Cooper Union, she teaches core electrical engineering courses and works to introduce new offerings that bridge engineering and the biosciences, helping students grow as engineers, innovators, and socially conscious researchers.