Alejandra Uranga is currently a Gabilan Assistant Professor at the USC Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering. Before joining USC in January 2016, she was a Postdoctoral Associate (1.5 years) and then a Research Engineer (4 years) in the Aeronautics and Astronautics Department, Gas Turbine Laboratory, at MIT working with Edward Greitzer. There she led the efforts to develop the D8 double-bubble aircraft concept under the NASA N+3 Program, in the Project entitle "Aircraft and Technology concepts for an N+3 subsonic transport," first as the Technology Lead of the Phase II (2010-2015) led by MIT and in collaboration between MIT, Aurora Flight Sciences, Pratt & Whitney, and NASA, and later as the Principal Investigator of Phase III (2015-2017) for which the United Technologies Research Center (UTRC) and University of Michigan also joined the team. The D8 is an innovative aircraft configuration targeting a service entry in the 2025-2035 timeframe and which has the potential to provide significant reductions in fuel burn, emissions, and noise. [Read more in the Research page]

Alejandra Uranga completed her Ph.D. at MIT in 2010 in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Aerospace Computational Design Laboratory (ACDL), with a thesis on the use of high-order numerical methods for the simulation of transition in low Reynolds number flows. This was part of a AFOSR MURI project on biologically inspired flapping flight. Her thesis work work was co-supervised by MIT Professors Jaime Peraire and Mark Drela. Her research group developed high-order accurate solvers based on the Discontinuous Galerkin Finite Element method for computational fluid and solid mechanics. [Read more in the Research page]

She obtained a Master of Applied Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Victoria, BC, Canada, which was completed in August 2006. Her Master's thesis work focused on the comparison of turbulence models applied to the flow around stationary and oscillating cylinders using a compressible Finite Volume method, and was co-supervised by Ned Djilali and Afzal Suleman.

Her undergraduate education was completed in France and in Florida, USA, with a B.S. degree in Aerospace Engineering obtained in May 2004 in a joint program between the Florida Institute of Technology, Florida, USA, and the SKEMA Bachelors (fromerly Euro American Institute) in Sophia Antipolis, France. She also holds a two-year college degree in Mathematics (DEUG MIAS, 2000) from the Université Paris 7 Denis Diderot, Paris, France.

She is an AIAA Senior Member, holds a Gabilan Assistant Professor Chair since 2017, and was the recipient of the USC Provost's Assistant Professor Fellowship in 2016, In 2009 she was awarded the MIT Institute Graduate Student Council Teaching Award for the School of Engineering. She was awarded a Special Research Fellowship from the University of Victoria in 2005-2006, and received a Florida Institute of Technology Transfer Scholarship in 2002-2004. In 2002, she was honored "Best Student" in the School of Engineering and recognized as Distinguished Student Scholar at the Euro American Institute of Technology.