2025 CAREER Award Recipient: Nadia Figueroa

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.

A Career Shaped Across Continents

Figueroa returned to Germany for her master’s degree, where a thesis project at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) gave her her first experience with humanoid robotics. She worked on Rolling Justin, an early humanoid robot designed for remote operation in space.

Her contribution — a perception system enabling the robot to recognize its hands and self improve estimation and calibration errors — was later incorporated into the robot’s deployed algorithms.

“It was exciting to see my work used in a real-world system. That’s when I realized I could pursue research for a living and potentially run a lab of my own,” she says.

After working as a research engineer on robot perception and interactive media at NYU’s Abu Dhabi campus in the United Arab Emirates, she moved to Switzerland to pursue a Ph.D. on full-system robot intelligence. As part of the EU-funded RoboHow project, Figueroa taught robots to perform everyday kitchen tasks such as rolling pizza dough, grating cheese, peeling vegetables and following recipe instructions from WikiHow, a line of research that she is now pursuing in her Penn Engineering robotics kitchen. 

After completing this project, Figueroa expanded into human-robot collaboration, studying how robots can safely lift, push, pull and manipulate objects alongside people. Her work took her to the U.S., where she joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a postdoctoral associate, expanding her work on safe and interpretable human-robot interaction strategies before coming to Penn Engineering in 2022.

Building Physically Intelligent Robots at Penn Engineering

In her lab today, Figueroa and her students work across control, learning, perception and robot design to achieve “fluid physical interaction,” a regime where robots co-regulate motion, force and intent continuously, adapting to uncertainty just as humans do.

“What excites me most is building robots that can understand the world the moment they touch it,” Figueroa says. “Our algorithms bring sensing, learning and control together so a robot can instantly judge how heavy something is, adjust its strength or follow a person’s guidance through touch. I want to build robots that can help lift or carry objects safely, open jars or doors, polish a surface with human feedback or handle items it has never seen before. And with a new humanoid robot coming to the lab next year, we’ll be able to explore even more complex, whole-body tasks like carrying boxes, navigating cluttered spaces and truly working alongside people in a natural way.”

Learning from Human Muscles

Figueroa collaborates closely with her campus colleagues Josh Baxter in Penn Medicine and Flavia Vitale in Penn Engineering and Penn Medicine to understand human biomechanics and apply those principles to robot design.

One project, a “muscle-in-the-loop” training platform, allows robotic arms to adjust their resistance based on real-time measurements of a participant’s muscle tension and strength. The system has applications in rehabilitation, athletics and the study of human motor adaptation, and may ultimately inform muscle-inspired robot controllers.

“Humans have built-in redundancy. When one part of the system fails, other parts compensate. Robots don’t do that yet,” Figueroa says. “Understanding how muscles and neural signals propagate gives us a blueprint for more resilient machines.”

Shaping the Next Generation of Roboticists

Over the next five years, this CAREER Award will not only support the research goals of Figueroa’s lab, it will support educational initiatives that integrate research with hands-on learning and broaden participation in STEM. Figueroa is committed to mentoring students who are curious, open-minded and unafraid to tackle the fundamentals.

“We need students who want to understand the physics, math and engineering behind robot motion,” she says. “Only with rigorous foundations can we build safe, capable robots and physically intelligent machines.”

Her long-term vision: robots that can operate safely in workplaces, homes, gyms and care settings with minimal human effort and maximum safety.

“It’s incredibly hard to make robots truly useful for people,” she says. “But if we can teach robots to move, feel and adapt like we do, even just a little, we can unlock enormous potential for human well-being.”

Learn more about Figueroa’s research on her website.