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Yancy Diaz-Mercado, a faculty member in the University of Maryland’s (UMD) Department of Mechanical Engineering, has been promoted to the rank of associate professor with tenure. The move was announced in May by Harry Dankowicz, chair of the department, who cited Diaz-Mercado’s potential for leadership in the field.
“I find Yancy's scholarship notable not only for its level of difficulty and rigor, but also for his willingness to engage with the complexities of interdisciplinary research,” Dankowicz said. As a recent example, he pointed to Diaz-Mercado’s U.S. patent, issued in March 2025, for an apparatus and method for robotic procedures with magnetizable tools.
Throughout his career at UMD, Diaz-Mercado has published in various prestigious venues on control and robotics, such as the IEEE Transactions on Robotics, the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, and Wiley's Advanced Intelligent Systems, while also presenting papers at prestigious gatherings, such as the International Conference on Robotics and Automation.
A UMD faculty member since 2018. Diaz-Mercado directs the Collaborative Controls and Robotics Laboratory, where he and his team work to develop collaborative autonomy in multi-agent systems using tools from network and optimal control theory. Applications are wide-ranging and include, in addition to autonomous surgery and healthcare, human-swarm interactions and defense.
Diaz-Mercado is an affiliate faculty of the Department of Computer Science and Institute for Systems Research, an affiliate member of the Maryland Robotics Center, and an affiliate fellow at the Robert E. Fischell Institute for Biomedical Devices.
June 3, 2025
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