Rate My Professor Alan Bowling

Alan Bowling is a Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington. A native of Austin, Texas, he earned his B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 1988. Following two years at McDonnell Douglas Space Systems Company in Houston, he pursued graduate studies at Stanford University, obtaining both an M.S. and a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering in 1998. After his doctorate, he engaged in entrepreneurial activities in California for three years before joining the faculty in the Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Notre Dame in 2001. Bowling moved to the University of Texas at Arlington in 2008, where he has advanced through the ranks to full professor.

Bowling's research centers on multibody dynamics, design, and control, with emphasis on contact and impact problems, robotic legged locomotion, and biomechanics at various scales, including small-scale mechanobiology. He directs the Biomechanics, Robotics, and Dynamics Laboratory, advancing multiscale modeling and simulation, hybrid dynamic simulations incorporating impacts and friction, design and motion control for agile legged robots, cell mechanics simulations, and robotic manipulator capabilities. In 2022, he was elevated to Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers for contributions to high-speed simulations and modeling of micro- and nano-sized objects in liquids and impact/contact dynamics. He leads a National Institutes of Health-funded project awarded $416,000 in 2021 to develop accelerated simulations predicting stem cell differentiation pathways, correlating nuclear morphology with outcomes like adipogenesis for applications in tissue engineering. Representative publications include his textbook Vector Mechanics: A Systematic Approach (2nd ed., 2016); "Energetically Consistent Simulation of Simultaneous Impacts and Sliding Contacts" (Multibody System Dynamics, 2009); "Correlation between Nuclear Morphology and Adipogenic Differentiation of Mesenchymal Stem Cells" (Scientific Reports, 2019); and "Long-term Dynamic Simulation of Cellular Systems with Applications to Stem Cell Differentiation" (2024). His methodologies enable computationally efficient long-term predictions, influencing robotics, dynamics, and regenerative medicine.