Aaron Dollar Wins NASA Early Career Faculty Award

Aaron Dollar, John J. Lee Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science, has been awarded a 2014 Early Career Faculty Space Technology Research Grant. Administered by NASA, the award will provide Dollar $600,000 over three years for his project, “Digital Manufacturing of Lightweight and Efficient Structures via Reconfigurable Lattice Printing.”

Dollar’s previous research has centered on grasping and manipulation, rehabilitation robotics, and biomechanics. His robotic hands are particularly notable for their underactuated fingers—which, for example, may have only one motor controlling four fingers—and joints made of compliant, flexible materials that passively adapt to variations in object geometry during grasping tasks. These hands form the basis of Dollar’s OpenHand Project, which seeks to advance the design and use of robotic hands through open-source, rapid-prototyping techniques.

In addition to the NASA Early Career Faculty Grant, Dollar has previously received a 2013 Young Faculty Award from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a 2011 Young Investigator Award from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and a 2010 CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation.

NASA’s Early Career Faculty grants are awarded to outstanding faculty researchers to accelerate the development of innovative, early stage technologies that address high priority science and exploration needs for America's space program.