Organizers

Robert Baines is a Ph.D. candidate at the Faboratory at Yale University, in the department of mechanical engineering and materials science. He received his master’s degree from Yale University in mechanical engineering and materials science in 2019, and his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Rice University in 2013. His research harnesses novel materials to achieve reconfigurable deformations of soft systems. He is the recipient of an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, the NCCR (Swiss National Science Foundation) Robotics Fellowship, and the Yale first-year fellowship.

Sree Patiballa is an incoming Assistant Professor (Spring 2022) in the Mechanical Engineering department at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Faboratory at Yale University, in the department of mechanical engineering and materials science. He earned his Ph.D. (2020) in System Engineering and M.S. (2015) in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Before this, he received B.Tech. (2013) in Mechanical Engineering from Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham University in India. Sree’s research broadly investigates the nexus of design, manufacturing, and integration of mechanical metamaterials and soft robotics to develop intelligent systems. He is the recipient of the Mavis Future Faculty Fellowship and the Freudenstein/GM Young Investigator Award from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME).

Benjamin Gorissen is a research scientist at Facebook Reality Labs. He obtained his master's degree in engineering from the University of Leuven, Belgium. He subsequently started his PhD studies at the same university and in part at Ritsumeikan University, Japan. He worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Leuven before transitioning to Harvard University where he joined the Bertoldi group between 2018-2021. His research is focused on harnessing structural nonlinearities to create innovative inflatable actuator designs, and applying them to the field of soft robots to increase their functionality.

Atoosa Parsa is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at University of Vermont. She is working under the supervision of Professor Josh Bongard at Morphology, Evolution and Cognition Laboratory. Her research focuses on applying Evolutionary Algorithms to the design of granular metamaterials. Prior to joining MECLab, she received her M.Sc. degree in Machine Intelligence and Robotics and her B.Sc. degree in Computer Hardware Engineering from University of Tehran.