Profile: Floris is interested in understanding how organisms such as insects process and integrate sensory information to help guide their behavior, with the ultimate goal of designing robust control systems for robotics applications. He believes that an understanding of how such tiny animals can avoid walls and coffee cups could lead to a revolution in control theory, where the state of the art currently requires hundreds of orders of magnitude higher raw processing power compared to a fruit fly’s sesame seed size brain. As an undergraduate at Cornell, Floris was awarded a Cornell Presidential Research Scholarship, which funded his undergraduate research project to design the first passively stable flapping hovering machine at the Cornell Computational Synthesis Lab.