Sonia Martínez

Sonia Martínez Díaz is a Spanish mechanical engineer whose research applies control theory to the coordinated motion of robot swarms and mobile wireless sensor networks. She is a professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of California, San Diego.

Education and career Martínez was the first in her family to study at a university, the University of the Basque Country. She has a licenciatura in mathematics from the University of Zaragoza, awarded in 1997, and she completed a Ph.D. in engineering mathematics at Charles III University of Madrid in 2002, working with of the Institute of Mathematical Sciences.

After working as a visiting assistant professor at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, she came to the US on a Fulbright Fellowship for postdoctoral research with Francesco Bullo at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and University of California, Santa Barbara. She took her faculty position at the University of California, San Diego in 2005, and became a full professor there in 2014.

Recognition In 2018, Martínez was named an IEEE Fellow, affiliated with the IEEE Control Systems Society and IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, "for contributions to geometric mechanics and control". She was named as a SIAM Fellow, in the 2026 class of fellows, "for fundamental contributions to the theory of multi-agent and robotic systems with applications to distributed control, sensing, and estimation".

Selected publications Articles . Winner of the CDC Best Student-Paper Award.

. Listed as a "classic paper" by Google Scholar. . Winner of the 2008 IEEE Control Systems Magazine Outstanding Paper Award.

Books