Maria Santos, a Ph.D. student in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), has been chosen for a La Caixa Fellowship for Graduate Studies in North America.

Awarded by La Caixa Foundation, a non-profit institution in Spain, this scholarship is one of the most prestigious and competitive awards that a student can receive in Spain for pursuing master’s or doctoral studies in either the United States or Canada. King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia of Spain presented these awards to 52 Spaniards in a ceremony held on May 23 in Barcelona.

Santos is a member of the Georgia Robotics and Intelligent Machines Lab, where she is advised by Magnus Egerstedt, who directs the lab and who holds the Julian T. Hightower Chair Professorship in Systems and Controls. 

Santos’ work deals with how to model well-defined music theory rules to allow a human operator to control a swarm of robots, emulating how a conductor is able to modify the music played by a group of musicians. She is particularly interested in modeling harmony rules, which deal with how to connect different chords within a musical key (a scale) and how to transition between different keys, to define how the interactions between the different robots in a swarm must occur and how the swarm can transition between different behaviors.