Huertas Cerdeira Receives NSF CAREER Award

Cecilia Huertas Cerdeira, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Maryland (UMD) is the recipient of a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award that will support her innovative research in underwater robotics. The award was announced in December.

Huertas Cerdeira will be studying the properties of caudal fins—the main engine of locomotion for many aquatic species, including dolphins and fish—with an eye to engineering human-made propellers that can replicate their performance.

More specifically, she is interested in how the distribution of stiffness in a caudal fin affects its efficiency and maneuverability. The stiffness pattern determines how a fin bends or deforms when it is flapped; the bending, in turn, affects fluid mechanics. By experimenting with different stiffness distributions, Huertas Cerdeira hopes to determine the optimal configuration—both for fins found in nature, and for human-manufactured equivalents – and to elucidate the flow mechanics that lead to optimality.

The work is significant because advances in propulsion and locomotion are needed in order to realize the full potential of underwater autonomous vehicles (UAVs), which are used for applications such as environmental sensing and monitoring, maintenance of underwater infrastructure, and aquaculture. Current UAVs are not as useful for these purposes as they could be, due to factors such as battery life, noise, and lack of agility.

To help bring about advances in these areas, Huertas Cerdeira and other researchers are turning to nature for inspiration. As she explains, “biological organisms tend to be well-adapted to their environments as a result of trial and error through millions of years of evolution. Thus they provide excellent models for human engineering.”

Experiments will be conducted at a water tunnel in UMD’s Hydrodynamics Lab and later at the Maryland Autonomous Technologies Research Innovation and eXploration (MATRIX) Lab, located in Southern Maryland. In addition to the research work, Huertas Cerdeira will also utilize the CAREER award support to develop a Gemstone honors course focused on bioinspired underwater robotics, as well as a summer K-12 course to be launched in collaboration with Women in Engineering.

A 2019 graduate of the Ph.D. program in aeronautics at the California Institute of Technology, her research includes robotics, experimental fluid mechanics, and fluid-structure interactions. In addition to her faculty position in the mechanical engineering department, she is also an affiliate of the Maryland Robotics Center, which is part of the Institute for Systems Research.

The CAREER Award is NSF's most prestigious honor for early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in their fields. Other UMD mechanical engineering faculty who have received the award include Avik Dutt, Katrina Groth. Jin-Oh Hahn, Johan Larsson, Ryan Sochol, and Eleonora Tubaldi.

Published January 24, 2025