The Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering faculty have special interest and expertise in five thrust areas: dynamics and controls, fluid dynamics and propulsion, mechanics of materials and structures, systems and design, and thermal and transport sciences.<br><br>Research in dynamics and controls covers a broad multi-disciplinary area of theory and practical applications. The general aim is to model, analyze and regulate the behavior of dynamical systems in the presence of modeling errors, perturbations and disturbances, while ensuring a level of optimality in carrying out a sought objective. Additional challenges are introduced when the task is to be carried out by a collection of autonomous systems in a distributed, decentralized manner. Estimating parameters and learning while carrying out assigned tasks is yet another layer of increasingly more powerful capabilities becoming available with new technologies and availability of computational resources. Specific areas of interest include control theory and algorithms, autonomous and distributed systems, navigation and flight systems and machine learning.<br><br>The area of fluid dynamics and propulsion includes incompressible and compressible turbulent flows, multiphase flows, chemically reacting and other nonequilibrium flows, turbomachinery, electrosprays, aeroelasticity, aerodynamic optimization and aeroacoustics. Computational approaches include direct numerical simulation and large-eddy simulation, laboratories include wind tunnels, anechoic chambers, and high-speed jet facilities. Specific areas of interest include: aeroacoustics, aeroelasticity, biomedical flows, combustion theory, computational fluid dynamics, electrosprays, jet and rocket propulsion, multiphase flow, and turbomachinery.