Ephrahim Garcia
Associate Professor
Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
Since receiving his PhD in 1990, Ephrahim Garcia has worked for the Department of Defense, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). He’s taught at Vanderbilt University, conducted research for NASA, and started his own consulting company. Now, as part of what he calls his "strange but fun path," he’s come to Cornell as an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering.
"When researchers leave an organization like DARPA, they usually get very high-powered jobs in industry," says Garcia, who was named a Presidential Faculty Fellow by Bill Clinton. "But I wanted to get back to the trenches of academia, to go someplace where there were really good students and really good colleagues."
After growing up in New York City as the child of Cuban émigrés, Garcia attended the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he earned a PhD, concentrating in smart controls in microelectromechanical systems. Since then, he’s focused on mechatronics, using entomological models to create a new generation of bio-inspired robots. Though he doesn’t consider himself a roboticist, he’s excited by the challenge of building machines that can locomote efficiently and change their shape to adapt to the environment around them.
If that sounds like science fiction, Garcia can certainly understand. His two-year-old daughter is too young to read, but his nine-year-old son has become an avid sci-fi fan, playing with robots and Internet strategy games. Newly relocated to Cortland, where his wife works as obstetrician-gynecologist, Garcia is looking forward to unpacking his boxes, teaching his son to play ice hockey, and getting back to work.
"Nature works at the atomic scale, making these really beautiful mechanisms," says Garcia, "while we humans come up with these large-component contraptions which are sometimes less than elegant. What I’m trying to do is look at biology, to examine nature, and see what kind of insight that can bring to our mechanical designs."
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