About

Haneesh Kesari is an Associate Professor of Engineering at Brown University. His research interests include analytical and experimental mechanics, as well as structural biomaterials. He is involved in advancing understanding in these areas through his work, which has contributed to the development of more durable electronic devices and wearable technology aimed at preventing, detecting, and understanding traumatic brain injuries. Kesari has been actively engaged in collaborative projects and research initiatives, including work on flexible electronics, neurotechnology, and brain injury prevention, and has been recognized for his contributions through participation in significant research programs and symposiums.

Research topics

• Physics
• Geodesy
• Mechanics
• Classical mechanics
• Geology
• Mathematics
• Statistics

Selected publications

• Determining the Acceleration Field of a Rigid Body Using Three Accelerometers and One Gyroscope, With Applications in Mild Traumatic Brain Injury

  Journal of Applied Mechanics · 2026-02-03 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author

  Abstract Acceleration–deceleration mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) arises when the head experiences rapid motions, as in sports and military training. The risk of mTBI strongly correlates with the head’s kinematics, motivating the development of wearable devices that can reconstruct them. Accelerometer-only (AO) algorithms (such as Rahaman et al., 2020, J. Mech. Phys. Solids, 143, p. 104014; Padgaonkar et al., 1975, J. Appl. Mech., 42(3), pp. 552–556) are attractive for they enable the wearables based on them to comprehensively reconstruct the kinematics while at the same time being stable, and not requiring the numerical differentiation of angular velocities. However, the AO algorithms require their accelerometers not to lie in a plane. This greatly limits the scope and adoptability of their wearables, since they can no longer have a headband-style design. In this work, we present a new algorithm that employs three accelerometers and a gyroscope, which we term the A3G1 algorithm. It has all the aforementioned attractive features of the AO algorithms. Additionally, it allows its sensors to lie in a plane. We provide a mathematical proof that the only constraint on the A3G1’s sensors placement is that its three accelerometers do not lie on a line. We experimentally demonstrate the algorithm’s utility and robustness by applying it in a mock soccer-header exercise.

  PublisherDOI

• Traumatic brain injury on-a-chip: a microfluidic device for the compression of cortical spheroids

  Minds at UW (University of Wisconsin) · 2026-05-05

  datasetOpen access

  8-bit tiff confocal images of EthD-1 and Hoechst channels, as well as the processed masks used for cell death quantification.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Field Evaluation of a Wearable Instrumented Headband Designed for Measuring Head Kinematics

  Annals of Biomedical Engineering · 2026-03-13

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Purpose To study the relationship between soccer heading and the risk of mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI), we previously developed an instrumented headband and data-processing scheme to measure the angular head kinematics of soccer headers. Laboratory evaluation of the headband on an anthropomorphic test device showed good agreement with a reference sensor for soccer ball impacts to the front of the head. In this study, we evaluate the headband in measuring the full head kinematics of soccer headers in the field. Methods The headband was evaluated under typical soccer heading scenarios (throw-ins, goal-kicks, and corner-kicks) on a human subject. The measured time history and peak kinematics from the headband were compared with those from an instrumented mouthpiece, which is a widely accepted method for measuring head kinematics in the field. Results The time-history agreement (CORA scores) between the headband and the mouthpiece ranged from ‘fair’ to ‘excellent’, with the highest agreement for angular velocities (0.79 ± 0.08) and translational accelerations (0.73 ± 0.05) and lowest for angular accelerations (0.67 ± 0.06). A Bland–Altman analysis of the peak kinematics from the headband and mouthpiece found the mean bias to be 40.9 $$\%$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mo>%</mml:mo> </mml:math> (of the maximum mouthpiece reading) for the angular velocity, 16.6 $$\%$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mo>%</mml:mo> </mml:math> for the translational acceleration, and −14.1 $$\%$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mo>%</mml:mo> </mml:math> for the angular acceleration. Conclusions The field evaluation of the instrumented headband showed reasonable agreement with the mouthpiece for some kinematic measures and impact conditions. Future work should focus on improving the headband performance across all kinematic measures.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Traumatic brain injury on-a-chip: a microfluidic device for the compression of cortical spheroids

  Minds at UW (University of Wisconsin) · 2026-01-01

  dataset

  8-bit tiff confocal images of EthD-1 and Hoechst channels, as well as the processed masks used for cell death quantification.

  Publisher

• Cracking in polymer substrates for flexible devices and its mitigation

  ArXiv.org · 2025-04-14 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen access

  Mechanical reliability plays an outsized role in determining the durability of flexible electronic devices because of the significant mechanical stresses they can experience during manufacturing and operation. These devices are typically built on sheets comprising stiff thin-film electrodes on compliant polymer substrates, and it is generally assumed that the high-toughness substrates do not crack easily. Contrary to this widespread assumption, here we reveal severe, pervasive, and extensive cracking in the polymer substrates during bending of electrode/substrate sheets, which compromises the overall mechanical integrity of the entire device. The substrate-cracking phenomenon appears to be general, and it is driven by the amplified stress intensity factor caused by the elastic mismatch at the film/substrate interface. To mitigate this substrate cracking, an interlayer-engineering approach is designed and experimentally demonstrated. This approach is generic, and it is potentially applicable to myriad flexible electronic devices that utilize stiff films on compliant substrates, for improving their durability and reliability.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Role of layered architecture in marine sponge root fibres: new lessons from nature for the design of tension cables

  Journal of The Royal Society Interface · 2025-03-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Patterns found in structural materials of biological origin are an excellent source of inspiration for engineers. The root fibres (basalia spicules) of the marine sponge Euplectella aspergillum anchor it to the ocean floor and exhibit a lamellar architecture. It is generally thought that the spicule’s architecture contributes to the spicule’s fracture toughness. However, in recent experiments, the spicules’ architecture did not contribute to their fracture toughness in a statistically significant way, with their fracture initiation toughness being similar to that of synthetic glass. In this article, we present a mechanics model and show that the spicule’s architecture could be contributing to its strength, potentially benefiting the sponge’s survival. When a spicule forms a loop, we find that its layers can increase the spicule’s strength by reducing the bending stress induced by the tensile load transmitted along its length.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The mechanics of the squash nick shot

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2025-05-13 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  Squash is a widely popular racket sport, practiced by millions of people worldwide, played inside a walled court. When played well, players can last for several minutes before the ball bounces twice on the floor. There is, however, an unanswerable shot. When the ball hits the nick between a vertical wall and the floor, under certain conditions, it rolls without any vertical bounce. We study this process experimentally. We determined that the ball must hit the vertical wall first at a narrow range of heights above the floor, but most importantly, it must touch the floor before finishing its rolling time on the vertical wall. When the rolling time is shorter than the contact time, the vertical momentum is canceled due to a mechanical frustration condition. This behavior is explained considering a contact model, which agrees with the experimental observations. In addition to its relevance to other walled ball sports, this understanding could help design rolling shock dampers with possible practical applications.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Laboratory evaluation of a wearable instrumented headband for rotational head kinematics measurement

  ArXiv.org · 2025-04-02

  preprintOpen access

  Mild traumatic brain injuries (mTBI) are a highly prevalent condition with heterogeneous outcomes between individuals. A key factor governing brain tissue deformation and the risk of mTBI is the rotational kinematics of the head. Instrumented mouthguards are a widely accepted method for measuring rotational head motions, owing to their robust sensor-skull coupling. However, wearing mouthguards is not feasible in all situations, especially for long-term data collection. Therefore, alternative wearable devices are needed. In this study, we present an improved design and data processing scheme for an instrumented headband. Our instrumented headband utilizes an array of inertial measurement units (IMUs) and a new data-processing scheme based on continuous wavelet transforms to address sources of error in the IMU measurements. The headband performance was evaluated in the laboratory on an anthropomorphic test device, which was impacted with a soccer ball to replicate soccer heading. When comparing the measured peak rotational velocities (PRV) and peak rotational accelerations (PRA) between the reference sensors and the headband for impacts to the front of the head, the correlation coefficients (r) were 0.80 and 0.63, and the normalized root mean square error (NRMSE) values were 0.20 and 0.28, respectively. However, when considering all impact locations, r dropped to 0.42 and 0.34 and NRMSE increased to 0.5 and 0.41 for PRV and PRA, respectively. This new instrumented headband improves upon previous headband designs in reconstructing the rotational head kinematics resulting from frontal soccer ball impacts, providing a potential alternative to instrumented mouthguards.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Approximating a matrix as the square of a skew-symmetric matrix, with application to estimating angular velocity from acceleration data

  ArXiv.org · 2025-04-15

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  In this paper we study the problem of finding the best approximation of a real square matrix by a matrix that can be represented as the square of a real, skew-symmetric matrix. This problem is important in the design of robust numerical algorithms aimed at estimating rigid body kinematics from multiple accelerometer measurements. We give a constructive proof for the existence of a best approximant in the Frobenius norm. We demonstrate the construction with some small examples, and we showcase the practical importance of this work to the problem of determining the angular velocity of a rotating rigid body from its acceleration measurements.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A brain cancer microtissue model for studying tumor cell and neural cell interactions

  Scientific Reports · 2025-10-15 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  Glioblastoma (GBM) is an aggressive brain cancer with a poor prognosis and is challenging to study due to its high degree of inter- and intra-tumoral heterogeneity and complex tumor microenvironment. Current in vitro models of GBM, including patient-derived organoids and 2D and 3D cell cultures can recapitulate aspects of the GBM biology, but interactions with normal cells of the central nervous system remain challenging to model. Herein, we introduce a new 3D biomimetic brain cancer microtissue (BCM) developed by co-culturing rat cortical microtissues with rat glioma cell lines. Leveraging this model, we have characterized glioma cell motility, invasiveness, and interactions with neurons, astrocytes, and microglia. GBM cell behavior in the BCM model is consistent with that observed in vivo. This robust and versatile platform will enable future high-throughput therapeutic screening and detailed insights into primary glioma biology and potentially other brain tumors and cancers that metastasize to the brain.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Emergence of New Properties at the Large-Scale on Elastic Surfaces due to Small-Scale Adhesion and Waviness

  NSF · $375k · 2016–2021

Frequent coauthors

• Y. Wan

  University of Antwerp

  29 shared

• Diane Hoffman–Kim

  Providence College

  22 shared

• Rafael D. González-Cruz

  Providence College

  20 shared

• Michael A. Monn

  Providence College

  19 shared

• Weilin Deng

  Guangdong University of Technology

  17 shared

• Wenqiang Fang

  Providence College

  16 shared

• Alice Lux Fawzi

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  15 shared

• Sayaka Kochiyama

  10 shared

Education

• PhD in Mechanical Engineering

  Stanford University

  2011

• M.S. in Mechanical Engineering

  Stanford University

  2007

• Bachelor of Technology in Mechanical Engineering

  Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati

  2005

Awards & honors

• $1.7M ONR grant (2024)