Dr. Kara Peters is a Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at North Carolina State University. She received her PhD in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Michigan in 1996. For her dissertation work, she received the Ivor K. McIvor Award for Applied Mechanics at the University of Michigan. Following her PhD, Dr. Peters worked as Post-Doctoral Researcher in the Laboratory of Applied Mechanics at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Swiss Institute of Technology at Lausanne). Dr. Peters is a member of the ASME Adaptive Structures and Material Systems Technical Committee and was the chair of the SPIE Smart Structures and Materials Symposium in 2010 and 2011. She is an Associate Editor of the journal Smart Materials and Structures and on the editorial board of Measurement Science and Technology. Currently, Dr. Peters is serving as a rotator as the Program Manager of the Mechanics of Materials and Structures Program at the National Science Foundation.