Laura Villafañe Roca named AIAA Associate Fellow

Aerospace engineering faculty member Laura Villafañe Roca has been selected to the Class of 2025 Associate Fellows of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. She will be formally honored and inducted in January ’25 during the AIAA SciTech Forum.

AIAA Associate Fellows are individuals of distinction who have made notable and valuable contributions to the arts, sciences, or technology of aeronautics or astronautics. Villafañe Roca has been recognized by AIAA “for outstanding contributions to experimental research in fluid dynamics and measurement techniques and their impact to aeronautics and aerospace systems”.

Her area of expertise is experimental fluid mechanics and multiphase flow physics. She received her Ph.D. from the von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics and the Universitad Politècnica de València and joined the department in January 2019 after four years as postdoc and research scientist at Stanford. In 2023, she also became an affiliate of Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology.

Since arriving in 2019, Villafañe Roca has received three Early Stage Innovations awards from NASA's Space Technology Research Grants program for research on plume surface interactions in the framework of Lunar and planetary landings and on parachute fluid and structural mechanics. She is also principal investigator on two NASA graduate research projects: “Imaging and Analysis Framework for Parachute Micro-structural Basis” with support from the NASA Space Technology Graduate Research Opportunities program, and “Advancing millimeter-wave radar interferometry for landing ejecta measurements” with support from the NASA Science Mission Directorate through a Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology award.

In addition to developing a four stories-long vertical turbulent channel flow facility for her group’s research on particle-laden flows, over the past two years, she has developed a unique collaborative effort with Beckman and the United States Military Academy centered on the use of Magnetic Resonance Imaging for fluid dynamics research. As part of this effort, senior design students from West Point travel yearly to the Illinois campus to perform MRI experiments using the scanners at the Biomedical Imaging Center at Beckman Institute. The three-dimensional flow data is being used to advance research on turbulent mixing and ventilation dynamics.

This past year, Villafañe Roca gave five invited seminars across the United States and Europe and was named Young Observer to the USNC/TAM. She serves AIAA nationally as a member of the Fluid Dynamics Technical Committee and as the Illinois Section Chair, and she is the faculty advisor for the U of I AIAA Student branch. Under her supervision, a group of Illinois undergraduate students got second place on the 2024 NASA’s Human Lander Challenge competition.

The selection process to be elected Associate Fellow is highly competitive, and only approximately 17 percent of the AIAA membership are associate fellows. For the complete list of 2023 Associate Fellows, visit AIAA's website.