Petia Vlahovska

Petia Mladenova Vlahovska (born circa 1973) is a Bulgarian engineer specializing in biophysics and fluid mechanics. A 2019 Fellow of the American Physical Society and 2024 Guggenheim Fellow, she is a professor in the McCormick School of Engineering, in the Department of Engineering Sciences and Applied Mathematics.

Biography Vlahovska was born in around 1973 to parents who were engineers. Moving from her native northern Bulgaria, where she later started her postgraduate studies as a research associate at the Laboratory of Chemical Physics and Engineering. She was later a David Crighton Fellow (2004-2005)

After visiting positions at the Brown University School of Engineering (2003-2005) and a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces She teaches classes in fluid mechanics and biophysics, as well as in applied mathematics and vector calculus. In 2019, she was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society for "pioneering work on problems in interfacial flows and soft matter, including the fluid-structure interaction in Stokes flow, the mechanics of biomembranes, and electrohydrodynamics." She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2024; she intends to use the Fellowship to do research on the use of active fluids in cytological microbotics. In 2025, she was one of six engineers to receive a National Science Foundation TRAILBLAZER Award.