News & Events

11-20-19

Chris Roh, Research Engineer, working with Professor Morteza Gharib, discovered a unique way that bees navigate the interface between water and air. When a bee lands on water, the water sticks to its wings, robbing it of the ability to fly. However, that stickiness allows the bee to drag water, creating waves that propel it forward."I was very excited to see this behavior and so I brought the honeybee back to the lab to take a look at it more closely," Roh says. [Caltech release]

Tags: research highlights GALCIT Morteza Gharib Chris Roh

11-06-19

Beverley McKeon, Theodore von Karman Professor of Aeronautics, has unlocked some of the secrets behind turbulence, a much-studied but difficult-to-pin-down phenomenon that mixes fluids when they flow past a solid boundary. "We knew that, underlying these very complicated structures, there had to be a very simple pattern. We just didn't know what that pattern was until now," says McKeon. [Caltech story]

Tags: research highlights GALCIT Beverley McKeon

10-30-19

Postdoctoral Scholar Carlos M. Portela, working with Professor Julia Greer and Dennis Kochmann, has won the Gold Paper Award. The title of the paper is "Supersonic Impact on Carbon Nano-architected Materials." The award was granted to the best student contribution across all topic areas at the Society of Engineering Science (SES) 56th Technical Meeting.

Tags: APhMS honors Julia Greer Dennis Kochmann postdocs Carlos Portela

09-18-19

Professor Morteza Gharib, has designed a new generation of heart valves that are longer-lasting, cost less to manufacture, and are more biocompatible than options that are currently available to patients. One of the new valves has been implanted into a human for the first time. "This is among my proudest moments. Creating something with the potential to save and improve lives is one of the reasons I became an engineer," Gharib says. [Caltech release]

Tags: research highlights GALCIT MedE Morteza Gharib

09-18-19

Wolfgang Knauss, Theodore von Karman Professor of Aeronautics and Applied Mechanics, Emeritus, has received the 2019 Founder’s Award from the International Digital Image Correlation Society (iDICs). It recognizes individuals who have made a pioneering contribution, either through a novel application of image correlation or development of methodologies that have significantly impacted the field. [List of award recipients]

Tags: honors GALCIT Wolfgang Knauss iDICs Founder's Award

08-21-19

Caltech Center for Autonomous Systems and Technologies (CAST) has awarded seed funding to three new collaborative projects. The first project was proposed by Aerospace postdoctoral scholar H. Jane Bae, along with Professors McKeon, Tropp, and Meiron. It aims to develop algorithms to predict the onset of extreme events in real time thus allowing autonomous air vehicles to avoid or compensate for the rough turbulent airflow. The second project was proposed by Professors Effros, and Murray and will focus a new approach to the analysis, design, and implementation of complex, networked systems with the goal of optimizing latency in information sharing. The third project was proposed by Professor Thompson and JPL colleagues I. Fenty, R. Castano, D. Limonadi, and G. Woodward. This project plans to take a step towards developing autonomous observing arrays that will use ocean robotics to deploy ice melt-rate instruments within ice shelf cavities.

Tags: GALCIT Beverley McKeon Michelle Effros Joel Tropp Andrew Thompson Richard Murray Dan Meiron postdocs H. Jane Bae I. Fenty R. Castano D. Limonadi G. Woodward

08-09-19

Michael Ortiz, Frank and Ora Lee Marble Professor of Aeronautics and Mechanical Engineering, is the recipient of the 2019 U.S. Association for Computational Mechanics (USACM) John von Neumann Medal "for pioneering and sustained contributions in developing computational methods to elucidate material behavior across length and time scales (atomistic to continuum), development of the quasi-continuum method, and authorship of highly cited articles." This is highest award given by USACM. It honors individuals who have made outstanding, sustained contributions in the field of computational mechanics generally over periods representing substantial portions of their professional careers. [List of award recipients]

Tags: honors GALCIT MCE Michael Ortiz

07-23-19

The paper "Distributed multi-target relative pose estimation for cooperative spacecraft swarm" co-authored by GALCIT students Kai Matsuka, Sorina Lupu, Yashwanth Kumar Nakka, and Rebecca Foust, as well as Professor Soon-Jo Chung and JPL Chief Technologist, Dr. Fred Hadaegh has won one of the two Best Student Paper awards at the 2019 International Workshop on Satellite Constellations and Formation Flying (IWSCFF). The paper presents a multi-agent localization algorithm architecture applied to a large-scale spacecraft swarm. The proposed algorithm is verified by simulation and robotic experiments using the air-bearing spacecraft simulators. The team also acknowledged the work of two Caltech undergraduate students Aaron Feldman and Jennifer Sun for their contribution to the robotic experiments. [Read the paper]

Tags: honors alumni Soon-Jo Chung student Fred Hadaegh Kai Matsuka Yashwanth Kumar Nakka Rebecca Foust Sorina Lupu

07-19-19

Michael Ortiz, Frank and Ora Lee Marble Professor of Aeronautics and Mechanical Engineering, has received the highest academic distinction from the Polytechnic University of Madrid (UPM) in a ceremony chaired by its Rector, Guillermo Cisneros, accompanied by José Manuel Torralba, general director of Universities and Superior Artistic Teachings of the Community of Madrid. Professor Ortiz was recognized as one of the leaders in theoretical and computational solid mechanics. Rector Cisneros stated that the curriculum and life path of Professor Ortiz is "an example of what a true Master - teacher with capital letters - should achieve or at least maintain as a goal. " [elEconomista Coverage]

Tags: honors GALCIT MCE Michael Ortiz

07-16-19

Leonardo da Vinci studied the motion of blood in the human body. He was interested in the heart’s passive, three-cusp aortic valve, which he realized must be operated by the motion of blood. He theorized that vortices curl back to fill the cusps in the flask-shaped constriction at the aorta’s neck. Morteza Gharib, Hans W. Liepmann Professor of Aeronautics and Bioinspired Engineering; Booth-Kresa Leadership Chair, Center for Autonomous Systems and Technologies; Director, Graduate Aerospace Laboratories; Director, Center for Autonomous Systems and Technologies, has used modern imaging techniques to demonstrate the existence of the revolving vortices that Leonardo interpreted as closing the valve. [Nature Article]

Tags: research highlights GALCIT MedE Morteza Gharib