Dr. Tianlu Wang joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Hawaii at Manoa as an Assistant Professor and led the SAIL in Spring 2024. Since January 2026, he has been a Cooperating Faculty member in the Department of Ocean and Resources Engineering at UHM and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at The Queen’s Medical Center in Honolulu. He was a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Germany, supervised by Prof. Metin Sitti. Previously, he received his Doctor of Sciences and Master of Science degrees, both from ETH Zurich. His research focuses on small-scale soft robotic actuation, perception, and control, as well as on the development of novel small-scale soft systems for real-world environmental and medical applications. His work has been published in Nature, Nature Communications, Science Advances, Advanced Materials, Nature Reviews Bioengineering, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), and Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS). He is the recipient of the NSF CAREER Award in 2026, American Heart Association Career Development Award in 2026, Best Workshop Paper Award at RSS 2025, Young Researcher Award at the 11th European Solid Mechanics Conference in 2022, Best Poster Award at the Gordon Research Conference on Robotics in 2022, and the Best Paper Award at RSS in 2019.

Contact: tianluw@hawaii.edu

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