Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow
Sara Oliveira Santos is a Postdoctoral Scholar specializing in ecological and environmental fluid mechanics, with a multidisciplinary background in engineering, biology, and robotics. She earned her Ph.D. at Brown University, where she used shrimp as a model organism to develop bio-inspired underwater robots designed to explore oceans on Earth and ocean worlds like Europa and Enceladus. Through quantitative visualization methods on live shrimp and robotic analogs, she revealed that shrimp generate lift via leading-edge vortices—a mechanism previously known in insect flight—highlighting convergent evolution across vastly different environments.
Currently a Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics, Sara is developing bio-inspired tracers to study turbulence in marine environments. Inspired by the geometry of phytoplankton, she designs custom 3D-printed particles and equips them with onboard accelerometers to capture time-resolved flow dynamics in laboratory turbulence tanks. These tracers will enable unprecedented insight into small-scale transport processes relevant to ocean mixing, biogeochemical cycling, and particle aggregation.
Sara’s curiosity in fluid mechanics has led her to engage with a wide range of interdisciplinary problems, from optimizing human swimming and investigating the fluid dynamics of breastfeeding to designing underwater vehicles. Her research takes a systems-level approach to biofluid dynamics, grounded in physical principles and guided by environmental relevance and design utility.
Interests
Bio-inspired robotics, ecological and experimental fluid mechanics, ocean world exploration.
Academics
Ph.D. in Engineering, Fluids and Thermal Sciences, Brown University
M.S. in Aerospace Engineering, Iowa State University
B.S. in Mechanical Engineering, The University of Akron