Award
2018 NSF Career Award Winner
Department
Biomedical Engineering and Mechanics
What is the impact of your research?
I see the outcomes of my research as primarily impacting two areas. First, when we study how bats are super effective at living and moving in groups, we expect to learn some bat-inspired strategies to design engineered systems of multiple agents (like robots, autonomous cars, etc.) better. Second, learning about what bats do and how they do it is really interesting in itself, especially since bats in the US are critically threatened at the moment from habitat loss, new threats like wind turbines, and this awful fungal disease called white nose syndrome. Hopefully, something we learn about bats can help bat conservation, as well as technologies for humans!
What do you like most about the field of dynamics and/or motion?
I like my field because, like almost all science, it allows us to make sense of the physical world. For my specific area, it allows me to use fancy (or even not so fancy) math to answer questions about how and why animals may do what they do.
What path did you take to get to this point in your career and research?
I studied math in undergrad and for my masters, but then worked in a great, interdisciplinary mechanical engineering lab for my Ph.D., with Dr. Maurizio Porfiri, a Virginia Tech Engineering Science and Mechanics alum. Working with Dr. Porfiri really opened my eyes to how math could be used to understand and control systems in the real world. After that, I joined the Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics here (which is now Biomedical Engineering and Mechanics), which was very supportive of research at the interface of engineering, biology and math.
When you are not researching, what do you enjoy doing in your spare time?
I have a garden, which is a continuous, long-term experiment.