Alyssa Hernandez, PhD
Functional Morphologist, Biomechanist, Engineer
ABOUT ME
My research career started as an undergrad at Cornell University, where I received my Bachelor of Science in the Department of Natural Resources. I was broadly-trained as an ecologist during my degree, but I had a particular interest in entomology and insect/plant interactions. After graduating, I did a year-long term as an AmeriCorps intern, where I served the San Mateo County Resource Conservation District in Half Moon Bay. During that time, I focused on citizen science and spent most of my term educating local farmers about beneficial insects and native plants. While I loved my time as an AmeriCorps, I realized that I really missed research and soon joined UC Berkeley as a research entomologist. Most of this research focused on integrative pest management, considering reduced risk methods for controlling common crop pests.​​
RESEARCH INTERESTS
​​After a few years at Berkeley, I decided to pursue my PhD and joined Professor Brian Farrell's lab in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. During that time, I became fascinated with biomechanics and functional morphology, and pursued a new research path. While my research continued to focus on plant-insect interactions, I instead focused on insect locomotion, specifically evaluating adaptive functional morphologies utilized for attachment and locomotion on plant surfaces. This fascination with the diversity of adhesive systems seen in nature inspires my current work, and ​I'm currently a postdoctoral fellow in Professor Robert Wood's lab at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University.
My current research focuses on developing bioinspired adhesive devices for robotic applications. Because I was initially trained as a biologist before transitioning to engineering for my postdoctoral work, I use a holistic approach for device design, integrating multiple fields like ecology, evolutionary biology, and biomechanics. I use diverse animal groups (e.g. clingfish, insects) as inspiration for this work, developing tools that can improve a variety of real-world applications. Alternatively, I am also interested in using these fabricated models as tools for biological research, producing studies that test biomechanical hypotheses. I want my research to highlight how both biology and engineering can inform each other, producing appropriate models for engineering applications or comparative morphological studies.
Current and future research topics of interest:
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Functional morphology of biological adhesive systems
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Insect locomotion
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Bioinspired devices for ambulatory robots and aquatic monitoring tags
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Robots and physical models for biomechanical studies
Figure 1: Using biology and engineering to understand adhesive systems in nature. Blue box: Organisms use different strategies for adhesion depending on ecological conditions. For example, intertidal clingfish must maintain stability in rocky, aquatic environments, while leaf beetles require quick, reversible attachment for locomotion. Yellow box: Adhesive systems are diverse (e.g. clingfish suction disc or beetle adhesive hairs and claws), and often incorporate multiple mechanisms/structures for attachment. Red box: Thorough biological evaluation translates to relevant physical models for comparative biomechanical studies, which can also inform biologically inspired devices for real world applications.(e.g. fish-inspired suction discs attaching marine monitoring tags (top) or insect-inspired leg spines for walking robots (bottom)).
Contact Me
Thanks for your interest in my research! If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me via email at ahernandez@g.harvard.edu