Amrita Basak was awarded a Shuman Family Early Career Professorship, which she will hold until 2027. Credit: Kelby Hochreither/Penn State.
Mechanical engineering early career professor: Amrita Basak
May 11, 2026
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. —Amrita Basak, associate professor of mechanical engineering, was awarded a Shuman Family Early Career Professorship, a three-year professorship that Basak will hold until 2027. Penn State mechanical engineering alumnus Clyde Shuman and his wife Nancy pledged $1 million to establish the professorship in 2010.
Q: What is the primary focus of your research?
Basak: Generally, my research falls under the umbrella of advanced manufacturing. I examine how we can make manufacturing processes better. The beauty of manufacturing is that everyone knows about it, whether they realize it or not. We eat and most of us cook — that is the most fundamental form of manufacturing. Someone gives you a cabbage, great, you can make salad. You can also process it into something new; curries, fritters, etc. You can add secondary materials (spices or another vegetable) to make something even better! A piece of metal is the same way – it may not be directly useful to us, but through manufacturing it can become something with functional value in your life. Our lab works with metals, specifically ones used in high-temperature applications like gas turbine engines and reactor environments. My role is to figure out how they fail so that we can make these metal parts stronger, to last longer.
I would say my research has three broad categories. First are the processing-focused projects, where we are trying to use different types of feedstocks, or raw materials, to understand how processing works. We are also studying artificial intelligence. We want to develop models that use machine learning to predict the properties of a part before it is printed, one that could be generalized for many parts using advanced AI tools. Some of our machine learning work is geared towards property prediction or processing prediction across scales, big and small. Finally, we’re focusing on the properties of parts. Say someone prints us something using their processing techniques. We qualify the part, test it. We test its strength, for example. Can it withstand heavy loads? Can it withstand temperatures appropriate for its application?
Q: What are some notable grants or achievements you have recently received?
Basak: Our research has been awarded the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Early Career Development Award, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Young Faculty Award and a Department of Energy Distinguished Early Career Program Award. There are also scientific machine learning awards from NVIDIA, as well as the Institute for Computational and Data Sciences (ICDS) Upskilling Fellowship Award. The ICDS grants these awards for faculty to learn something new. I am affiliated with the Convergence Center for Living Multifunctional Materials Systems (LiMC2), and through that affiliation I have become increasingly interested in biology. I started to realize how static materials cannot achieve the functionalities that living materials can do, thanks to my interactions with Zoubeida Ounaies, distinguished professor of mechanical engineering and director of LiMC2.
I think that’s the beauty of Penn State: They take risks. This upskilling award encourages you to be creative, and the beauty is that you do not need a prior credential or pedigree to try something new.
Q: How does the Shuman Family Early Career Professorship impact your work, and what does it mean to receive this recognition?
This professorship allows us to try out a unique set of experiments to study the properties of the additively manufactured metal parts used in gas turbine engines. The rule of thumb is that if you can raise the operating temperature of a part, your efficiency will increase. Support from this professorship presents an opportunity for us to qualify these high-temperature materials so that we can bring that expertise to mechanical engineering, to Penn State and to our group.
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