Elio J. Challita

I am driven by a simple question: how can small robots and clever physics let us observe living systems in ways we never could before? My work sits at the intersection of biomechanics, fluid dynamics, and robotics, focusing on animals and devices smaller than a centimeter and the “strange” physics that dominate their world.

During my PhD, I studied how insects and spiders in the Amazon and Central American Neotropics exploit surface tension, viscosity, and elastic structures to move, hunt and escape predators with extraordinary efficiency. Now, as a postdoctoral researcher, I translate those principles into field-ready tools: insect-scale robots, ultralight animal tags for species like pangolins, portable DNA-extraction devices, and ultrafast mechanisms that capture environmental DNA and fragile marine animals for genomic analysis.

I want to turn robots and frugal instruments into “tracking microscopes” that follow organisms across their lives, revealing how fine-scale mechanics and behavior shape ecosystems. Socially and ecologically, I want these tools to be open, robust, and inexpensive enough that local partners, students, and conservation practitioners can deploy them without waiting for a large, centralized expedition.

I hope that exploration becomes more distributed and collaborative: networks of small, smart, and shared tools, on land and at sea, deployed by diverse teams who co-own the data and the stories. If we can lower the barrier to seeing the invisible physics and biology around us, we can share the responsibility and the power of acting on what we find.

One of my favorite expedition memories took place on a six-hour boat ride back from the Los Amigos field station along the Madre de Dios River in the Peruvian Amazon. Our driver stopped for lunch at a tiny riverside village consisting of little more than a clearing and one large tree. While he ate, my team wandered over to that tree and discovered cicadas doing something extraordinary: they were firing ultrafast jets of liquid from their bodies. Producing such high-speed jets at miniature scales poses a profound challenge in both biology and engineering.

We immediately pulled out our phones, filmed the phenomenon with high-speed phone cameras, and tried to explain our excitement to amused local residents who could not understand why strangers were filming insects on a random tree. Those impromptu recordings sparked a multi-year project that connected fluid ejection in tiny cicadas to the same process in massive whales. The work produced a new fluid-dynamics framework for understanding jetting strategies and energetics across eight orders of magnitude in body size.

Just as formative were our visits to rural schools near field sites in Peru and Central America. We showed children high-speed videos of slingshot spiders and spitting termites that live in their own backyards. The gasps of wonder, followed by one student’s eager proposal to study how wind moves leaves, reminded me that curiosity is universal and that science belongs to everyone.

I design every expedition to include local students, teachers, and communities as co-discoverers. By sharing robust, low-cost tools and open protocols, we enable people to investigate the astonishing biology hidden in their rivers, forests, and schoolyards. Publishing papers matters, but turning local landscapes into living laboratories for the next generation matters more.