Mithun Goutham

Mithun is an assistant teaching professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Washington, where he primarily teaches in the GIX and MSTI programs. He believes that project-based learning will become increasingly central to education as AI lowers the barriers between ambitious ideas and their execution. Previously, as an assistant teaching professor at Illinois Institute of Technology, Mithun led a project-based course on optimizing the battery pack of a Formula SAE race car. He also helped develop a three-course sequence in which students learn engineering design, system analysis, and controls by building an autonomous quadcopter.

During his Ph.D. at The Ohio State University, Mithun worked on the optimization and control of autonomous robot fleets. As a research intern at Los Alamos National Laboratory, he developed methods to improve the resilience of the U.S. power grid to hurricanes using high-resolution forecast data. Before entering academia, he spent four years at Honda R&D designing motorcycle intake, exhaust, and fuel-supply systems.