Margaret Byron says the early career professorship has been influential in her ability to further support student research. Credit: Kate Myers/Penn State.
Mechanical engineering early career professor: Margaret Byron
May 11, 2026
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. —Margaret Byron, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, has been awarded a Tretheway Early Career Professorship, a three-year professorship that was established by alumnus Ed Auslander in honor of Martin W. Tretheway, professor emeritus of mechanical engineering and acoustics.
Q: What is the primary focus of your research?
Byron: My team and I are exploring how organisms and particles interact with complex flows in the environment. Under this general umbrella, we study the physics of animal swimming, partially by developing bioinspired robots and devices, as well as the transport of pollutants like microplastics and oil droplets.
I run a lab called the Environmental and Biological Fluid Mechanics Lab, and the name is intentionally general so we can have flexibility in exploring interesting questions at the intersection of fluid dynamics, organismal biology, and environmental science. Currently, one of our big projects is looking at multi-modality in animal locomotion. We are looking at how fluid dynamics can mediate the transition between any of the three major locomotor modes — swimming, walking and flying. The model system we’re using for this research is aquatic insects, which can move between all three locomotor modes. Our research will show us how fluid dynamics govern those three locomotor modes and the transitions between them.
Q: What are some notable grants or achievements you’ve recently received?
Byron: My doctoral student Reza Zharfa recently published a conference paper that was nominated as the best technical paper for its division. David Peterman, a postdoc in the lab from 2022 - 25, successfully secured a faculty position at Miami University of Ohio, and started teaching there in fall 2025.
I was awarded a U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award for research in animals capable of walking, swimming and flight. I have also been awarded the Beckman Young Investigator Award and the American Chemical Society Doctoral New Investigator Award. Also, I was recently the keynote speaker at last year’s DisCoVor, the 4th Colloquium on Vortex Dominated Flows, which was a cool way to recognize some of the work coming out of the lab on bio-inspired flexible propulsors. But the credit for all that should go to my students. Even if I am invited to speak or publish something, it’s the students underneath the hood. My students are the engine — they’re the engine behind any successful laboratory, and my role is to highlight their work.
Q: How does the Tretheway Early Career Professorship impact your work, and what does it mean to receive this recognition?
Byron: For a brief answer, the early-career professorship has been very helpful in giving me the opportunity to support student work—which I hope is in keeping with Marty Trethewey’s legacy as an extraordinarily dedicated educator. For example, I will use some funds this spring to support otherwise-unfunded students to present at a conference. It has also helped me to re-launch an area of my research that has been dormant for about five to six years, and to do some preliminary experiments on this topic that will lay the groundwork for bigger grant proposals.
I have long been interested in how inertial particles are transported in environmental turbulence. It was the subject of my doctoral dissertation. It’s a chance for me to return to my roots. I was able to recruit an excellent student, Alfredo Arevalo, who is helping me get the preliminary data to apply for larger grants. The funding for his undergraduate internship came from another early-career professorship recipient, Bladimir Ramos-Alvarado, who has done this incredible work building relationships with universities in Mexico, and has set up a pipeline of undergraduate research interns to come to Penn State. Alfredo was an undergraduate at the Monterey Institute of Technology and came to do a research internship with me as part of his required undergraduate experience. By the end, he was performing like a third-year graduate student. Now, he’s a doctoral candidate at Penn State, and I am in the process of applying for grants to support him throughout his doctorate. The early-career professorship has been critical for supporting Alfredo’s recruitment and his work thus far.
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