Jiaming (Mason) Liu

YALE UNIVERSITY

Relevant Coursework: Advanced Electron Devices, Advanced Robotic Mechanisms, Fluid Mechanics of Natural Phenomena

Graduate Research Assistant

• Led a joint project with Corning Inc., engineering a custom Joule heating system to apply cyclic thermal shocks to advanced oxide glasses at extreme heating rates of ~320°C/s.
• Quantified volume recovery (VR) over 1,000 thermal cycles via AFM, proving flexible Fusion 5 glass (28.23% VR) significantly outperforms rigid glasses (<17% VR).
• Demonstrated that sub-Tg cycling yields stronger crack healing (36.8% VR) than near-Tg heating (28.0% VR) by effectively preserving critical residual stresses.

Undergraduate Research Assistant

• Conducted battery materials research on polymer (polyethylene) separators for lithium-ion batteries, focusing on separator/electrode interface performance.
• Prepared and optimized thin film coatings via Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD) to enhance durability, thermal stability, and solvent resistance.
• Characterized films and coated membranes using SEM, TMA, and solvent immersion tests, achieving near-zero shrinkage at 140°C and excellent solvent stability.

Laboratory Assistant Intern

• Executed materials research on Ni-Ti alloys, analyzing phase transformation via Austenite finish temperature testing.
• Assessed surface roughness using laser microscopy, ensuring compliance with quality and safety standards for medical applications.
• Delivered performance data supporting alloy optimization and the development of durable, cost-effective materials for minimally invasive devices.

Manufacturing and Testing of Silicon-Based Optoelectronic Devices

• Fabricated p-type silicon photoconductors on 4-inch wafers using Cleanroom UV-lithography and e-beam evaporation to precisely pattern interdigitated electrodes.
• Characterized device I-V performance, confirming Aluminum (Al) formed an ideal Ohmic contact that yielded highly linear curves and stable, repeatable photocurrents.
• Troubleshot Titanium-Gold (Ti-Au) metal contacts exhibiting massive leakage currents, successfully identifying a blocking Schottky barrier to pinpoint and isolate interface failures.

Sim-Ready Hand: A Simulation-Enabled Underactuated Robot Manipulator

• Designed and manufactured an underactuated robotic hand optimized for reinforcement learning and sampling-based control simulations in MuJoCo.
• Replaced traditional flexible tendons with a rigid linkage-based mechanism and low-friction bearings, eliminating numerical instabilities to prevent physics simulator crashes.
• Bridged the sim-to-real gap by capturing dynamic physical data via a custom test stand, optimizing MuJoCo parameters using SciPy, and validating compliance via successful YCB object manipulation.

Viscous Fingering Instability & Flow Control

• Designed Hele-Shaw cell geometries and boundary conditions to control fluid-fluid displacement and suppress interfacial instabilities.
• Conducted experimental and theoretical analysis to evaluate the transition of viscous fingers across Newtonian/non-Newtonian fluid systems.