Nadia Figueroa Receives 2025 CAREER Award

Nadia Figueroa, Shalini and Rajeev Misra Presidential Assistant Professor in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics (MEAM), has received the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award, one of the most prestigious honors supporting early-career faculty whose work integrates research and education in meaningful and far-reaching ways.

Her award-winning project, “Constraint-Aware Estimation, Learning and Control for Fluid Physical Human-Robot Collaboration,” aims to fundamentally expand how robots sense, predict and physically interact with people in dynamic, real-world environments.

“We want robots to be truly useful, physically intelligent machines that understand us, adapt to us and keep us safe,” Figueroa says. “To get there, we need robots that can interact with humans as fluidly as humans interact with one another.”

A Path from Roller Coasters to Robotics

Growing up in Baja California, Mexico, Figueroa’s path into robotics was never one she set out on intentionally; her journey to robotics actually began at theme parks.

As a child, a short drive across the border on school trips took Figueroa to Six Flags, Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm. She spent hours waiting in line for roller coasters, which she filled by imagining how these machines worked, how they were fixed and how their designers kept people safe.

“I never imagined I would become a robotics professor. That wasn’t a conceivable goal for someone from where I came from,” she says. “But I always loved machines that move people.”

Her fascination with the mechanics of thrill rides led her to pursue one of Mexico’s first mechatronics engineering programs, where she learned the foundations of mechanics, electronics and programming. But her focus shifted after a formative experience at a Volkswagen factory near Berlin.

“While in undergrad, I had the opportunity to do a summer program in Germany learning about automotive design and engineering,” she says. “On the last day, we got a tour of the Volkswagen headquarters and main factory in Europe. Everything was built by robots! At that moment, I realized I didn’t want to build the cars, I wanted to build the robots building the cars.”

From there, Figueroa directed her career toward robotics that not only assemble machines, but interact with the world and with humans.

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