Team

Sam Kriegman is a Postdoctoral Associate at the University of Vermont. His research draws inspiration from the origin and subsequent evolution of life, and applies the underlying mechanisms of self-organization (“order for free”) and natural selection (“survival of the fittest”) to the creation of novel autonomous machines: robots, in all manner of shapes and sizes, that act on their own, without remote control. These machines can in some cases perform useful work, or they may be used as scientific tools to understand how animals evolve, grow, move, sense, and think.

Amir Mohammadi Nasab is a postdoctoral researcher at Yale University. In his research, fundamental insights from solid mechanics, materials engineering, and thermal science are implemented to design and fabricate new mechanisms and new smart multifunctional materials to impact critical domains such as soft robotics, wearable devices, and biomedical devices.

Douglas Blackiston is a Principal Scientist in the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University and Visiting Scholar in the Wyss Institute at Harvard University. His research program has the overarching goal of understanding developmental plasticity — the response of cell populations in vivo to alterations in patterning, local environment, and signaling from neighboring tissues. His work encompasses many diverse questions and models, from the ability of memory to survive metamorphosis in moths and butterflies, to the capacity of transplanted eyes to restore vision in blind vertebrates.

Hannah Steele is a student at Yale University who aims to become a mechanical engineer with a PhD focusing on sustainable design, with the eventual goal of working in the space industry.

Michael Levin is the Vannevar Bush Professor of Biology at Tufts University, and the director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts. His work uses developmental biophysics, cognitive science, and computational modeling approaches to understand tissue plasticity, especially focused on bioelectrical information processing in non-neural cell networks. Working at the intersection of regenerative biology and basal cognition, his group seeks to develop new applications in birth defects, regeneration, cancer, and synthetic morphology by learning how cell collectives make morphological decisions and cracking that code to motivate them toward desired anatomical outcomes.

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.

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 living systems. 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. 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.