Jovana Andrejevic
School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

Jovana Andrejevic is a graduate student in Applied Physics in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. She completed her undergraduate studies in 2016 at Cornell University, with a major in Engineering Physics and minor in Applied Math. As a member of Prof. Chris Rycroft's research group, Jovana is passionate about work that lies at the intersection of computation and material properties, and her projects help foster the interdisciplinary culture of the engineering school through collaborations that bridge experiment and theory. The complex behavior of disordered systems, such as crumpled sheets, has motivated a wide range of approaches to elucidate patterns in their formation and evolution. The aim of Jovana's research is to apply both data-driven and simulation-based computational techniques to probe predictable behavior in the dynamics of thin crumpled sheets. The data-driven approach, conducted in collaboration with the Rubinstein group as part of a MRSEC seed effort, applies machine learning methods to characterize the structure and evolution of complex ridge networks observed in experimental crumpling data. The simulation-based method, through joint efforts with Prof. Ariel Amir, provides a controlled means of examining diverse crumpled geometries, and testing the theoretically motivated connection between the relaxation dynamics of crumpled states and their underlying distribution of relaxation rates. Alongside academics, Jovana has nurtured a fondness for teaching since her time at Cornell, where she worked as a teaching assistant and mentored high school girls through the CURIE Academy summer program. Now at Harvard, she has served as a Teaching Fellow for a year-long series of undergraduate introductory physics courses which place a strong emphasis on active and team-based learning. She has also helped to consult and mentor other PhD students in teaching strategies, and hopes to continue her involvement in discussions of pedagogy throughout her PhD studies.