Robotic Materials Expert Ryan Truby Joins Northwestern Faculty

Northwestern Engineering’s Departments of Materials Science and Engineering and Mechanical Engineering have welcomed Ryan Truby to the faculty as an assistant professor. Prior to joining the McCormick School of Engineering, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, where he worked on the design, fabrication, and control of soft-sensorized robots. Truby earned his PhD in applied physics from Harvard University, and a bachelor of science in biomedical engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. 

His Robotic Matter Lab at Northwestern designs material systems – or robotic materials – that provide robots unprecedented capabilities via novel material forms and functions. Its research programs focus on three core themes in pursuit of this mission: design, fabrication, and control of robotic materials. Truby is interested in translating soft material functionalities into novel robotic capabilities, beginning with a focus on new actuation strategies for the design of artificial muscles. Central to these design efforts are enabling new material properties and computationally guided fabrication of robotic materials via new methods of digitally patterning and assembling soft materials. Finally, the material systems Truby is working on require new control strategies designed specifically for soft matter devices. He is interested on leveraging machine learning and new soft sensing strategies to create more autonomous soft machines.

At Northwestern, Truby will also be a core member of the Center for Robotics and Biosystems, allowing him and his research group to continue working at the intersection of materials science and engineering and robotics.

Truby has received awards in both materials science and engineering and robotics, including the Gold Award for Graduate Students from the Materials Research Society, and the Outstanding Paper Award at the 2019 IEEE International Conference of Soft Robotics. His research has received international attention and media coverage from outlets such as the New York Times, MIT Technology Review, BBC, National Geographic, NBC, Science, and Nature. His work on the Octobot was highlighted as a Nature Editor’s Choice article for 2016 and received a People’s Choice Vizzie Award for Scientific Visualization from the National Science Foundation. Truby’s work at the intersection of materials science and robotics has been supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and a Schmidt Science Fellowship.