Nathan is broadly interested in environmental flows and their interactions with engineering systems, particularly in relation to renewable energy, light aerial vehicles, and human impacts on local climate and ecology. His group combines lab- and field-scale experiments and physics-based modeling to characterize these dynamics and incorporate them into design and control approaches for enhanced performance. Specific research areas include leveraging unsteady flows in the control and optimization of wind turbines and wind farms, large-scale field measurements of atmospheric flows in complex environments, and the development of novel atmospheric flow-sensing platforms using drones, balloons, and other uncrewed aerial systems. The overarching goal of these activities is to develop cost-effective and site-specific sensing, prediction, and control capabilities that will help accelerate the clean-energy transition while mitigating the harmful impacts of climate change on vulnerable communities and ecosystems worldwide.