Advisory Panel

Rebecca Kramer-Bottiglio is the John J. Lee Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at Yale University. Working at the intersection of materials, manufacturing, and robotics, her group is deriving new multifunctional materials that will allow next-generation robots to adapt their morphology and behavior to changing tasks and environments. She is the recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, the NASA Early Career Faculty Award, the AFOSR Young Investigator Award, and the ONR Young Investigator Award. She was named to Forbes’ 30 under 30 list for her approach to manufacturing liquid metals through printable dispersions and scalable sintering methods, and she received the PECASE award for her development of robotic skins that turn inanimate objects into multifunctional robots.

Yigit Menguc is a research scientist at Meta's Reality Labs, with a courtesy faculty appointment to Oregon State University's Collaborative Robotics and Intelligent Systems (CoRIS) Institute. He has over 10 years of experience successfully leading academic and industrial science teams to high impact publications and patents in Soft Robotics, Haptics, Materials Science, 3D Printing, and Mechanical Engineering.

Josh Bongard is the Veinott Professor of Computer Science at the University of Vermont and the director of the Morphology, Evolution & Cognition Laboratory. His work involves computational approaches to the automated design and manufacture of soft-, evolved-, and crowdsourced robots, as well as computer-designed organisms. A PECASE, TR35, and Microsoft New Faculty Fellow award recipient, he has received funding from NSF, NASA, DARPA, the U.S. Army Research Office and the Sloan Foundation. In addition to many peer-reviewed journal and conference publications, he is the author of the book How The Body Shapes the Way we Think. He runs an evolutionary robotics MOOC through reddit.com and a robotics outreach program, Twitch Plays Robotics.

Katia Bertoldi is the William and Ami Kuan Danoff Professor of Applied Mechanics at Harvard University. Bertoldi’s research contributes to the design of materials with a carefully designed meso-structure that leads to novel effective behavior at the macroscale. Bertoldi investigates both mechanical and acoustic properties of such structured materials, with a particular focus on harnessing instabilities and strong geometric non-linearities to generate new modes of functionality. Since the properties of the designed materials are primarily governed by the geometry of the structure (as opposed to constitutive ingredients at the material level), the principles Bertoldi discovers are universal and can be applied to systems over a wide range of length scales.