Peter A. Gustafson, PhD is a Professor of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering (College of Engineering an Applied Sciences) and an Associate Professor of Medical Engineering (Homer Stryker MD School of Medicine) at Western Michigan University. His multidisciplinary research focuses on analytical and experimental structural mechanics of heterogeneous and composite materials. Areas of application include ground and flight vehicles, 3D printed flight structures, tissues and materials in musculoskeletal biomechanics, and medical device design and development. His recent contributions have focused on machine learning and multi-scale modeling techniques for prediction of fiber reinforced composite and 3D printed metallic structural damage.
Dr. Gustafson is currently enjoying a sabbatical as a visiting scholar at NASA Glenn Research Center and will return to WMU in Fall of 2022.
Beyond structural mechanics, Dr. Gustafson is active in open source software and hardware. In developing medical devices, Dr. Gustafson has used low cost open hardware microcontrolers as well as an open source software infrastructure to increase accessibility for use in low resource settings.
Prior to joining the faculty at WMU, Dr. Gustafson was an active member of the Composite Structures Laboratory of the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Michigan. He also spent six years working at the Ford Motor Company where he focused on prediction of powertrain durability. At Ford, his research included an investigation of aluminum ductility and thermal growth; an important aspect of the project was his work on stress measurements in silicon using Raman Spectroscopy. His work has also included investigations of the the impact behavior of thermoplastics.