The main focus of Kerstin Avila's research and teaching is the "Fundamentals of Turbulence and Complex Systems". This fundamental research will contribute to shaping the aerodynamic development of future wind turbines. The ForWind WindLab, with its turbulent wind tunnel that went into operation in 2017, offers optimal conditions for this. Before accepting the appointment to the University of Oldenburg, she conducted research at the University of Bremen and the Leibniz Institute for Materials Engineering IWT Bremen.

Kerstin Avila has been dealing with turbulence and complex flow behavior since her university studies. In 2013, she received her PhD from the University of Göttingen and the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization. After stays as a visiting scientist at the Institute of Science and Technolgy in Vienna and as a PostDoc at the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, she has been doing research at the University of Bremen in recent years. In addition to her work on the spreading of turbulence, the analysis of nonlinear resonances is one of her main research interests. Recently, she has made significant progress in this area through international collaboration, see e.g.,  "Data-driven modeling and prediction of non-linearizable dynamics via spectral submanifolds" (Nature Communications, 2022). As part of a DFG research unit, she leads the project "Dynamics and Instabilities of Particle-Laden Pulsatile Flows in Complex Pipe Geometries", in which she uses the modern Shake-The-Box measurement technique to measure fluid-particle interactions.

Her research complements the broad spectrum of process technology and physics research in the field of wind energy within ForWind. Currently, about 30 research groups and institutes of the universities of Oldenburg, Hannover and Bremen are members of ForWind.