Dr. Siddhesh Sakhalkar is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, where he leads the Mechanics, Modeling and Machine Learning (M-cubed) Lab. His research develops numerical methods and scientific machine learning models to understand and predict the mechanical behavior of complex engineering systems across macro-, micro-, and nanoscale regimes.
Dr. Sakhalkar holds a B.Tech. in Mechanical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology Bombay and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. He has seven years of industry experience, including five years as a Mechanical Simulation Engineer at Western Digital in San Jose, USA, and two years as a Mechanical Static Engineer at Shell in Bangalore, India.
During his doctoral research, Dr. Sakhalkar developed numerical models to study nanoscale lubricant flow, air bearing dynamics, interfacial forces and heat transfer at the head-disk interface in hard disk drives. At Western Digital, he utilized advanced computational techniques and machine learning/statistical tools to optimize the structural design and dynamics of next-generation hard disk drives.
Scientific Machine Learning (particularly, Neural Operators, Foundation Models)
Structural Mechanics and Dynamics (with a focus on System Identification, Design Optimization, Uncertainty Quantification)
Tribology
Micro- and Nanoscale Fluid Mechanics
International Data Technology Conference (Western Digital Conference) Best Paper Award (2023)
John and Janet McMurtry Fellowship (2019)
ASME 28th Conference on Information Storage and Processing Systems Best Paper Award (2019)
The Otto and Herta F. Kornei Endowment Fund Fellowship (2018)
Graduate Division Block Grant Award, University of California, Berkeley (2018)
Sakhalkar, S.V., Kaplan, B., Koosha, R. and Shindo, H., “Predicting device-to-device frequency response function variation during high-volume manufacturing of a hardware device,” Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing, 211, 111202 (2024)
Sakhalkar, S., Cheng, Q., Ghafari, A. and Bogy, D., “Investigation of heat transfer across a nanoscale air gap between a flying head and a rotating disk,” Journal of Applied Physics, 128, 084301 (2020)
Sakhalkar, S., Cheng, Q., Ghafari, A., Ma, Y. and Bogy, D., “Numerical and experimental investigation of heat transfer across a nanoscale gap between a magnetic recording head and various media,” Applied Physics Letters, 115, 223102 (2019)
Sakhalkar, S.V. and Bogy, D.B., "Viscoelastic Lubricant Deformation and Disk-to-Head Transfer During Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording," IEEE Transactions on Magnetics, 55, 3300506 (2019)
Sakhalkar, S.V. and Bogy, D.B., “Effect of rheology and slip on lubricant deformation and disk-to-head transfer during heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR),” Tribology Letters, 66, 145 (2018)
Sakhalkar, S.V. and Bogy, D.B., “A model for lubricant transfer from media to head during heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) writing,” Tribology Letters, 65, 166 (2017)
