Christina Harvey Receives NSF CAREER Award
The National Science Foundation, or NSF, has selected Assistant Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Christina Harvey of the University of California, Davis, to receive a Faculty Early Career Development, or CAREER, Award.
The prestigious award supports early-career faculty who exhibit potential to serve as academic role models in research and education. NSF selects recipients based on their groundbreaking research at the forefront of science, engineering and technology, and community service demonstrated through scientific leadership, education or community outreach.
Harvey’s CAREER award will fund a project that explores how hawks move and change the shape of their wings and tails during flight to initiate and control turning maneuvers.
By answering some of the fundamental questions of how birds perform lateral maneuvers, the research aims to promote the progress of animal flight science, develop biomechanical insights to support avian rehabilitation and inform the design of more maneuverable uncrewed aerial vehicles.
Utilizing motion capture and photogrammetry technologies at the UC Davis Center for Animal Locomotion and Innovation, or CALI, the project will identify which wing and tail changes are used by hawks to turn in flight. Wind tunnel experiments in the UC Davis Aeronautical Wind Tunnel will determine how specific wing and tail positions affect aerodynamic forces during turns.
Harvey and her team will use the aerodynamic data collected in the wind tunnel to inform a flight dynamics model that predicts maneuvering performance, and the resulting dataset will then be used to train an AI model to predict hidden wing joint positions from the visible wing shapes. The research outputs will be directly integrated into educational resources at the California Raptor Center, a bird rehabilitation facility at the UC Davis Weill School of Veterinary Medicine and CALI partner.
“It is truly an honor to win the CAREER Award,” said Harvey. “Much of my career to date has been studying longitudinal responses of birds or bio-inspired aircraft. This project will let my group expand into understanding the coupled effects of lateral stability and maneuverability like turning or rolling, a critical but highly complex flight state. I can’t wait to see what we learn from the birds.”
