Target Audience

Des Moines University faculty, staff, and students.

Speaker

Sarah A. Bentil, PhD

Dr. Bentil is a faculty member in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Iowa State University of Science and Technology. She is also a faculty member in the Neuroscience Interdepartmental Graduate Program and an affiliate faculty in both the Department of Biomedical Sciences and the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Iowa State University of Science and Technology. Additionally, she is the Director of The Bentil Group. She is also affiliated with the PANTHER (i.e., the Physics-bAsed Neutralization of Threats to Human tissuEs and oRgans) Program. Her research interests are in the field of soft tissue biomechanics and biomaterials. Dr. Bentil’s research program is interdisciplinary and includes the application of innovative solutions to identify, treat, and/or diagnose injuries and diseases in the brain. Members of her research program are developing and employing noninvasive experimental techniques to characterize the mechanical behavior of the brain and other soft materials. Computational studies are also being conducted to gain insight into how the response of soft materials relates to various biomedical problems.

She is the recipient of the 2022 Early Achievement in Research Award from Iowa State University’s College of Engineering. Dr. Bentil is also the recipient of the 2022 Springer/Nature Publishing Young Investigator Lecture Award by the Society for Experimental Mechanics (SEM) and the 2020 Air Force Research Laboratory Summer Faculty Fellowship Program Award. In 2015, Dr. Bentil completed her one-year postdoctoral appointment with the Hopkins Extreme Materials Institute (HEMI), located at Johns Hopkins University.

She received her Ph.D. from The Ohio State University in Mechanical Engineering in 2013. Prior to her studies at Ohio State University, she worked as an Engineer at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which is an agency of the United States Department of Transportation. She received her M.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Her undergraduate degrees (B.S.) in both Mechanical Engineering and Mathematics were obtained from the University of Vermont.