- This event has passed.
MEAM Seminar: “Nature in Motion: Unraveling Locomotion across Mediums and Scales”
September 23, 2025 at 10:15 AM - 11:15 AM
Biology and Engineering form an interdisciplinary two-way street. On the one side, natural solutions can inform and inspire the design of mechanical systems. This is referred to as bioinspired design. On the other side, referred to as engineering-enabled biology, controlled engineering experimental, numerical, and analytical tools are used and developed to answer fundamental biological questions that would be difficult or even impossible to answer directly using natural systems. This talk will introduce several examples of bioinspired multifunctional structures, such as feather-inspired flow control devices. Flow control devices on birds’ wings offer a pathway to advance the design of small aerial vehicles and inform flight control for airborne energy harvesters. In addition to bioinspired engineering, I will highlight a few examples of engineering-enabled biology, such as revealing the physics governing the aerial-aquatic transition of flying fish and the mechanism that enables click beetles’ legless jumping. These research topics demonstrate how nature can inform new locomotion, actuation, and control strategies in mechanical systems, highlighting that engineering analysis can provide valuable insights into nature’s locomotion and adaptation strategies.
Aimy Wissa
Associate Professor, Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Princeton University
Prof. Aimy Wissa is an associate professor in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department at Princeton University. She is the director of the Bio-inspired Adaptive Morphology (BAM) Lab. Wissa was a post-doctoral fellow at Stanford University, and she earned her doctoral degree in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Maryland in 2014. Wissa’s work focuses on modeling and experimental evaluation of dynamic and adaptive bioinspired structures and systems, including bird- and insect-inspired wings, as well as robotic systems with multiple modes of locomotion. Wissa is a McNair Scholar. She has received numerous awards, including the Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator and NSF’s CAREER awards.