M. Ani Hsieh is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering & Applied Mechanics at the University of Pennsylvania. She received a B.S. in Engineering and B.A. in Economics from Swarthmore College in 1999 and a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 2007. Dr. Hsieh has been a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Engineering Department at Swarthmore College (2007-2008) and an Associate Professor in the Mechanical Engineering & Mechanics Department at Drexel University (2008-2017). Her research interests include robotics, specifically many robot systems and marine robotics, geophysical fluid dynamics, and dynamical systems. She is a recipient of a 2012 Office of Naval Research (ONR) Young Investigator Award and a 2013 National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award. She is interested in problems that lie at the intersection of robotics, dynamical systems theory, and control.  Her work focuses on how robots interact with their environments and how the environment can be leveraged as an energy reservoir for robots.