Aimy Wissa

Aimy Wissa is a robotics researcher who studies how animal movement can inform robots and aircraft. She earned aerospace degrees at Penn State and Maryland, completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford, and joined the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2015, where she and Sameh Tawfick contributed to an origami crawler. Before joining Princeton, she received the AFOSR Young Investigator and NSF CAREER awards for her research. At Princeton, her lab studies bio-inspired locomotion, and her teams have used feather-inspired aircraft flaps and developed a grasshopper-gliding model for tiny robots. She is an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and co-director of Princeton Robotics.

Now at: Princeton University
Works: 80
Citations: 1,008
h-index: 17

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 27 October 2026.

Timeline

2008–2015

Degrees and a move to Illinois

She earns a B.S. in aerospace engineering at Pennsylvania State University in 2008 and a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering at the University of Maryland in 2014. After postdoctoral work at Stanford, she joins the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering as an assistant professor in 2015.
2017

An origami crawling robot

In 2017, she and Sameh Tawfick are part of a faculty-student team that uses origami folding to design a bio-inspired crawling robot. Its origami blocks mimic the gait and segmented form of earthworms.
2018–2021

Two early-career awards

In 2018, she receives the Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Award. The NSF CAREER award in 2021 supports her project on extreme locomotion, which uses click beetles as a case study.
2022

A Princeton bio-inspired lab

In January 2022, she joins Princeton’s Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Illinois. Her Bio-Inspired Adaptive Morphology Lab works on bio-inspired locomotion.
March 2025

Feather-inspired aircraft flaps

By March 2025, her team has fitted a remote-controlled aircraft with three rows of feather-inspired flaps. Flight tests show the flaps make the plane stall more gradually and at a higher nose angle.
July 2025

Tenure at Princeton

Princeton’s Board of Trustees approves her promotion with tenure, effective in July 2025.
January 2026

A model for grasshopper gliding

In January 2026, her team studies grasshopper gliding and develops a model that could enable multimodal locomotion for tiny robots.
April 2026

Insect-like robots and feather flaps

By April 2026, she has built robots with insect-like parts that fly and hop, and developed feather-inspired flaps to stabilize airplane wings at steep flight angles.
April 2026

Co-director of Princeton Robotics

In April 2026, Princeton appoints Wissa and Anirudha Majumdar as inaugural co-directors of Princeton Robotics. She is an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering whose research includes control, robotics and dynamical systems.