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mechanical & aerospace engineering (MAE) department

Warren Dixon

Professor, Dean’s Leadership Director, Director of the Nonlinear Controls & Robotics (NCR) Lab and the AFOSR Center of Excellence in Assured Autonomy in Contested Environments & MAE Department Chair

Dr. Dixon received his Ph.D. in 2000 from Clemson University. He worked as a research staff member and Eugene P. Wigner Fellow at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) until 2004, when he joined the University of Florida in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department, where he is now an Ebaugh Professor and Department Chair. His main research interest has been the development and application of Lyapunov-based control techniques for uncertain nonlinear systems. In 2016, he was awarded the Air Force Commander’s Public Service Award for his contributions to the U.S. Air Force Science Advisory Board. His work has been recognized by many entities and he has received several awards to date, among them: the IEEE Control Systems Technology Award, (2017-2019 & 2012-2013); the American Automatic Control Council (AACC) O. Hugo Schuck Award (2015 & 2009); the 2004 Department of Energy Outstanding Mentor Award; and the 2001 Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) Early Career Award for Engineering Achievement.

James Fairbanks

Assistant Professor

Before joining UF, Dr. Fairbanks worked at the Georgia Tech Research Institute on Data Analysis and High Performance Computing as applied to scientific computing and data science problems in healthcare. social science, epidemiology, biology, and physics problems. His work focuses on using programming language theory and algebraic techniques for designing and developing large scale software for technical computing problems.

His other research areas include:

  • Concurrency, Parallelism and High-Performance Computing
  • Database, Data Science and Informatics
  • Scientific Computing
  • Applied Category Theory
  • Mathematical Modeling
  • Combinatorial Algorithms (CPSs)
  • Programming Languages
  • Scientific Computing and Data Science
  • Graph Algorithms & Analytics
  • Numerical Methods

Piran Kidambi

Assistant Professor, Kidambi Research Group

Piran R. Kidambi is an Associate Professor at the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of Florida since Fall 2025. Prior to this he was a Harrington Faculty Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin (2024-2025) and Assistant Professor at the Departments of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering as well as Mechanical Engineering, Vanderbilt University (2017-2024). After receiving his PhD from the University of Cambridge (2014), he pursued postdoctoral research at MIT (2014-2017) through a Lindemann Trust Fellowship. Kidambi’s research leverages the intersection between (i) nanomaterial synthesis, (ii) process engineering, and (iii) in situ metrology, to enable bottom-up materials design and synthesis for hydrogen economy, next-generation energy, separations, national security, and healthcare applications. His research has been recognized via several awards and honors including 2024-2045 Donald D. Harrington Faculty Fellowship at UT Austin, ASME Rising Star (2024), AIChE NSEF Young Investigator (2023), DOE Early Career Award (2022), ACS PMSE Young Investigator (2022), NSF CAREER (2020), ECS Toyota Young Investigator (2020), and Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Award (2018), among others as well as several awards to his mentees from high-school to post-doctoral scholars.

Yu Wang

Assistant Professor, Director of Smart Autonomy Lab

Yu Wang is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of Florida (UF) and the Group Lead of Autonomous and Connected Vehicles of the UF Transportation Institute. He was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University. He received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering and M.S. in Statistics and Mathematics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). His research focuses on assured autonomy, cyber-physical systems, machine learning, and formal methods. This work on statistical verification of hyperproperties for cyber-physical systems was selected as one of the Best Paper Finalists of the ACM SIGBED International Conference on Embedded Software (EMSOFT) in 2019.