I graduated from the University of Colorado - Boulder in May 2014 and made my way to Los Angeles where I pursued my PhD in mechanical engineering at the University of Southern California. My coursework focused on robotic control systems & engineering design theory and methodology. I worked in the Autonomous Microrobotic Systems Laboratory (ASML) with Dr. Nestor Perez-Arancibia for five years, focusing on design and fabrication of sub-gram Flapping-Wing Micro Air Vehicles (FW-MAVs). I sourced the materials and worked on the robotic design at every step, from designing and building early robotic bee prototypes at USC to helping conduct the experiment that resulted in our first "liftoff." I devised a novel method to fabricate millimeter-scale, micronewton-resolution force sensors and published a journal paper in Smart Materials & Structures (IOP) on this topic.Using my force sensors to characterize the performance of the micro-robotic bees, I became interested in the unsteady fluid-structure interaction at the wings. I decided to design a scaled-up experiment that was mathematically similar to the "bee" (same Reynolds number) so I could use Tomographic-PIV to study the fluid dynamics at high resolution. I completed and defended this work under the guidance of Dr. Geoffrey Spedding in the Stratified Fluids Laboratory in the Department of Aerospace & Mechanical Engineering at USC.Having discovered my love of teaching over the years of my teaching assistantships, I took a teaching-track position in my home department at USC. I am currently teaching the Mechoptronics course (AME 341) and am the faculty advisor for the USC Solar Car competition team.