Speakers

Sukho Song is a group leader at the Laboratory of Sustainability Robotics at Empa (Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology) in Switzerland and a visiting researcher at the Aerial Robotics Laboratory at Imperial College London in the UK.  Previously, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Reconfigurable Robotics Laboratory and the Laboratory for Soft Bioelectronic Interfaces at EPFL. He also spent his postdoctoral tenure in the Soft Robotics and Bionics Laboratory at Seoul National University (SNU), South Korea. He obtained his Ph.D. in the department of mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, USA in 2017. During his studies, he was also a research associate in the Physical Intelligence Department at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Germany.  He received his undergraduate degree in Aeronautics and Space Engineering and master's degree in Nanomechanics at Tohoku University, Japan in 2005 and 2007, respectively. Dr. Song's research interest is design and manufacturing of multi-scale soft robots that combine microscale features with a larger scale soft robotic architecture for new functionalities.  Application areas of interest include, but not limited, soft bioelectronic interfaces for nervous system, electronics-free control of soft robots, bioinspired soft adhesion, and biohybrid robots.

Yong-Lae Park is Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Seoul National University (SNU) (2016~present).  Prof. Park completed his Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University (2010). Prior to joining SNU, he was an Assistant Professor in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University (2013~2017) and a Technology Development Fellow in the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University (2010~2013). His current research interests include artificial skins and muscles, soft robots, wearable robots, medical robots, and inflatable robots. He was selected as an Emerging Leader by the Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering (2020) and received the Best Application Paper Award from the IEEE Transactions on Haptics (2020), the Best Conference Paper Award in the IEEE International Conference on Soft Robotics (2019), Okawa Foundation Research Grant Award (2014), the Best Paper Award from the IEEE Sensors Journal(2013), a NASA Tech Brief Award (2012). His papers on soft artificial muscles and skin were selected as cover articles in various journals, including Soft Robotics, Advanced Intelligent Systemsand the IEEE Sensors Journal, and his work on soft robots were featured in Nature, Discovery News, New Scientist, engadget, PBS NOVA, and Reuters.

Amy Kyungwon Han is an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Seoul National University in Seoul, Korea. Before joining SNU, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University. She received a B.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Georgia Tech, followed by an M.S. and Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University. Her research interests include soft actuators, sensors, medical robotics, haptics, and biomimetics.

Prof. Han has received numerous awards, including the Outstanding Early Career Researcher Award from the Institute of Control, Robotics, and Systems in 2022 and the Best Poster Presentation Award at ICRA 2021, and she was a Best Paper Award finalist at the World Haptics Conference 2017. Additionally, she was selected as a Rising Star in Mechanical Engineering in 2019 and received the Samsung Scholarship and Kwanjeong Educational Fellowship for her graduate studies.

Tess Hellebrekers is currently a Research Scientist at Meta AI in the Embodied AI team. She previously completed her Postdoc with Professor Abhinav Gupta, also at Meta AI. Her PhD thesis work, “Hybrid Soft Sensing in Robotic Systems”, was completed with Professor Carmel Majidi in the Soft Machines Lab at Carnegie Mellon University in 2020. Her current research focuses on developing soft and stretchable sensors for robotic applications. This includes sensing skins for hybrid robots (conventional robots with compliant surfaces) and fully-soft robots (robots made of completely compliant materials). Moving forward, she is currently investigating soft sensor integration and the corresponding systems engineering challenges. Ultimately, she want to know what it takes to use soft sensors in real-world applications.