Kristofer S.J. Pister received his B.A. in Applied Physics from UCSD in 1986, and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from UC Berkeley in 1989 and 1992.  From 1992 to 1997 he was an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at UCLA where he helped developed the graduate MEMS curriculum, and coined the phrase Smart Dust.  Since 1996 he has been a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley.  In 2003 and 2004 he was on leave from UCB as CEO and then CTO of Dust Networks, a company he founded to commercialize wireless sensor networks. He participated in the creation of several wireless sensor networking standards, including Wireless HART (IEC62591), IEEE 802.15.4e, ISA100.11A, and IETF RPL. Commercial impact of his work includes the adoption of nodal analysis for MEMS design, XeF2 etchers for semiconductor and MEMS fabrication, wireless sensor networks, and low power Bluetooth radios in AirPods. He has participated in many government science and technology programs, including DARPA ISAT and the Defense Science Study Group, and is currently a member of JASON. He is currently the director of the Berkeley Marvell Nanofabrication Laboratory, and holds the Whinnery Chair in Electrical Engineering. His research interests include MEMS, micro robotics, autonomous microsystems, and low power circuits.

Prof. Amit Lal obtained his Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Caltech. He obtained his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. He conducted his doctoral research at the Berkeley Sensors and Actuators Center in the area of ultrasonic MEMS. After working at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as an assistant professor, he is now a professor at Cornell University, in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He has served as a Program Manager at DARPA in the Microsystems Technology Office, from 2005-2009. At DARPA he managed ten and started six new programs in the area of navigation, low-energy computation, bio-robotics, and atomic microsystems. He is the recipient of the NSF CAREER award and the Whitaker Foundation Award. With his students, he has won several best paper awards at the IEEE Ultrasonics and Frequency Control Symposium, and IEEE NEMS conferences. He is also a recipient of the Department of Defense Exceptional Service Award, and a Best Program Manager Award for his work at DARPA. 

Ronald Heisser is a design engineer who blends lessons from mechanics to discover principles for new, useful machine components and systems at the cm-scale and below. He graduated from MIT with an SB in mechanical engineering and philosophy, since completing his PhD at Cornell University under Robert Shepherd, studying micro-combustion in soft, elastomeric chambers. Currently, he is an Engineering Excellence postdoctoral fellow at MIT, doing research in muscle tissue engineering with Ritu Raman.

Steven completed his Ph.D. with Kirstin Petersen in the Collective Embodied Intelligence lab at Cornell University in 2022 and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at MIT with Daniela Rus and YuFeng Chen. During his Ph.D., he was a recipient of the Fulbright Germany Scholarship which allowed him to develop microrobot swarms at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems; he is also a recipient of the Cornell Colman fellowship, the National Science Foundation graduate research fellowship, and the MIT Postdoctoral Fellowship for Engineering Excellence. He is interested in using coupled oscillators to design, build, and deploy robot swarms to study their fundamental collective behaviors and apply them across biomedicine, self-assembly, and exploration.

Di Ni is a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, supervised by Professor Radika Nagal. Her research focuses on developing small-scale underwater robots to explore stable formation control and examine hydrodynamic principles within fish schooling behaviors. Prior to her current position, she completed her PhD at Cornell University under the guidance of Professor Amit Lal, where she specialized in creating innovative power supplies and actuators for insect-sized robotic platforms. Her research interests involve constructing robotic platforms that are bio-inspired, and employing them to investigate decentralized control emerging in collective behaviors.