Maria Holland

Biography

Maria Holland is the Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Notre Dame. She has previously been selected as a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, a National Science Foundation East Asian Pacific Summer Institute China Fellow, a Diversifying Academia Recruiting Excellence (DARE) Doctoral Fellow, and a Brit and Alex d’Arbeloff Stanford Graduate Fellow. Her research collaborators include the Institute for Biomechanics and Medical Engineering at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, and the Autism and Developmental Disorders Research Program at Stanford.

Research Interest

Dr. Holland’s research is in the area of computational biomechanics, using solid mechanics and computational tools to address important questions about complex soft materials. She focuses on the brain, addressing important questions about development and how it relates to the brain’s form and function (or dysfunction). The main goal of her research is to understand the mechanics of cortical folding, or how the brain gets its characteristic wrinkled shape, both in normal development and in cases that lead to developmental disorders such as autism. This work takes place through collaborations with clinicians and experimentalists. Additionally, she works to extend the functionality of traditional engineering methods to encompass soft, growing materials.