Professor Kristi Morgansen

Kristi Morgansen, Ph.D. is the Director of the Washington NASA Space Grant Consortium, Professor and Chair at the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the University of Washington and Boeing-Egtvedt Endowed Chair for Excellence in Engineering at the University of Washington.

Kristi is an advocate for project-based learning, inclusive engineering, multidisciplinary collaboration, and STEAM. She served as Director of Education, Outreach, and Diversity for the NSF ERC Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering in 2014 and as Deputy Director from 2012 to 2013.

Since 2021 she has been the lead PI of the Washington NASA Space Grant Consortium, whose mission is to promote STEM education at Washington’s diverse pre-college, college, university, and community learning centers. Kristi has tirelessly promoted STEM education in K-12 schools and diversity, equity, and inclusion in the College, at the UW, and in her field.

Kristi joined the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the University of Washington in the summer of 2002, as Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Engineering. In 2009, she became Associate Professor, and in 2015 Professor and the first Associate Chair for Academics in her department from 2015 to 2018 when she stepped in as Interim Chair of the department. She then served as Department Chair for a three-year term and has just been re-appointed for a five-year term.

Her research interests focus on nonlinear systems where sensing and actuation are integrated, stability in switched systems with delay, and incorporation of operational constraints such as communication delays in control of multi-vehicle systems. Applications include both traditional autonomous vehicle systems such as fixed-wing aircraft, launch vehicles, and underwater gliders as well as novel systems such as bio-inspired underwater propulsion, bio-inspired agile flight, human decision-making, and neural engineering.

Read Enabling sensing technology for the next generation of flight.

The results of this work have been demonstrated in estimation and path planning in unmanned aerial vehicles with limited sensing, vorticity sensing, and sensor placement on fixed-wing aircraft, landing maneuvers in fruit flies, joint optimization of control and sensing in dynamical systems, and deconfliction and obstacle avoidance in autonomous systems and in biological systems including fish, insects, birds, and bats.

Kristi earned her Bachelor’s Degree of Science in Mechanical Engineering in 1993 and her Master’s Degree of Science also in Mechanical Engineering in 1994, both from Boston University.

In 1996, she earned her Applied Mathematics S.M. from Harvard University before earning her Ph.D. there in 1999.

Before joining the University of Washington, she was Postdoctoral Scholar until 2001 and then a Senior Research Fellow in Control and Dynamical Systems until 2002 at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).

Her work includes over 100 peer-reviewed publications as well as field testing in commercial systems such as the Boeing ecoDemonstrator.

She is co-Founder and co-Director of the UW Space Policy and Research Center (UW SPARC) and Department of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board Member. She received an NSF CAREER award in 2003 and the 2010 AACC O. Hugo Schuck award for Best Paper in the Theory Category.

Kristi was a member of the 2018–2019 cohort of the Institute for Defense Analyses Defense Science Study Group, is Associate Fellow at AIAA, a Senior Member at IEEE, vice chair of the AIAA Aerospace Department Chairs Association, member of IFAC, and a member of the Washington State Academy of Sciences.

Watch her TEDxSeattle Talk Autonomous fish robots and bio-inspired engineering and her Animal-Inspired Robust Flight with Outer and Inner Loop Strategies.

Kristi is part of the Team at SPACEAIMS, where she is helping to draw on specialists with deep cross-disciplinary expertise in politics, national security, economics, business, law, military strategy, and policy. They advise, brief, train, and educate their clients in their enterprises and endeavors.

Watch Lummi Nation students talk with NASA astronaut who worked with their experiment on ISS and Academic-Industry Partnerships in Guidance, Navigation and Control.

Read Kristi Morgansen awarded Boeing Egtvedt Chairship and Robot Fish Could One Day Conquer Seas. Read Model for Aeroelastic Response to Gust Excitation.

Learn Analytical & Empirical Tools for Nonlinear Network Observability in Autonomous Systems with Kristi’s free online course.

Read The National Space Grant College & Fellowship Program (2020).

Visit her LinkedIn profile, her ResearchGate, and her Work Page. Follow her on Google Scholar, Loop, and Facebook.