21st Century Kinematics

- Computer-aided Invention of Mechanisms and Robots

- Mechanism Synthesis for Modeling Human Movement

- Algebraic Geometry and Kinematic Synthesis

- Numerical Algebraic Geometry and Kinematics

- Kinematic Analysis of Cable Robotic Systems

- Kinematic Synthesis of Compliant Mechanisms

- Protein Kinematics

J. Michael McCarthy is the Henry Samueli Professor and Director of the Center for Engineering Science in Design at the University of California, Irvine, which supports the design and execution of team engineering projects across the School of Engineering.  He completed his Ph.D. at Stanford University, and has taught at Loyola Marymount University and the University of Pennsylvania before joining UCI's Mechanical Engineering Department in 1986.

He has over 150 publications and three books including The Geometric Design of Linkages (Springer 2000, 2nd Ed. 2010).  His research team is responsible for the Sphinx, Synthetica and MecGen software packages, which extend computer-aided design to spherical and spatial linkage systems and integrate this process with geometric modeling.  He has presented tutorials on the design of linkages and robotic systems at ASME and IEEE conferences.

His contributions in teaching were recognized by a 2010 UCI Teaching Excellence in Undergraduate engineering Award and the Henry Samueli School of Engineering's 2009 Faribor Maseeh Teaching Award.  He is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), and has received the 2008 ASME Outstanding Service Award and the 2009 ASME Machine Design Award.  In 2011, he received the ASME Mechanisms and Robotics Award for his research contributions.