Dr. Metin Sitti received the BSc and MSc degrees in electrical and electronics engineering from Bogazici University in Turkey, and the PhD degree in electrical engineering from the University of Tokyo in Japan. He was a research scientist at University of California at Berkeley during 1999-2002 and a professor at Carnegie Mellon University during 2002-2016 in USA. Currently, he is a director at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Germany.

His current research focuses on three topics to understand the underlying principles of design and control of small-scale mobile robots for medical applications. His first sub-team works on novel micro/nanomaterials for miniature robots, where he has pioneered gecko-inspired microfiber adhesives for robotics and other applications. His second sub-team focuses on mobile millirobotics, where his sub-team has pioneered the soft-bodied magnetic millirobots with multimodal locomotion capability and created new bio-inspired water-walking, water-running, jumping-gliding, flying, and climbing miniature robots and soft capsule endoscopic robots for the gastrointestinal tract medical applications. His third sub-team focuses on mobile microrobotics for medical applications. This sub-team has pioneered bacteria-driven and microalga-driven bio-hybrid microswimmers and synthetic microswimmers for active drug and other cargo delivery.

He is an IEEE Fellow. He received the SPIE Nanoengineering Pioneer Award and NSF CAREER Award. He received more than 10 best paper and video awards in major conferences and journals. He is the editor-in-chief of Journal of Micro-Bio Robotics and Progress in Biomedical Engineering and associate editor in Extreme Mechanics Letters, Advanced Material Technologies, and Biomimetics & Bioinspiration journals.

 

Selected Publications

• Hu, G. L. Zum, M. Mastrangeli, and M. Sitti, “Small-scale soft-bodied multimodal locomotion,” Nature, vol. 554, no. 7690, pp. 81-85, Feb. 2018.
• Wang, J.V.I. Timonen, A. Carlson, D.M. Drotlef, C.T. Zhang, S. Kolle, A. Grinthal, T.S. Wong, B. Hatton, S.H. Kang, S. Kennedy, J. Chi, R.T. Blough, M. Sitti, L. Mahadevan, J. Aizenberg, “Multifunctional ferrofluid-infused surfaces with reconfigurable multiscale topography,” Nature, vol. 559, no. 7712, pp. 77-82, June 2018.
• Alapan, O. Yasa, O. Schauer, J. Giltinan, A. F. Tabak, V. Sourjik, and M. Sitti, “Soft erythrocyte-based bacterial microswimmers for cargo delivery,” Science Robotics, vol. 3, no. 17, eaar4423, 2018.
• Hines, K. Petersen, G. Z. Lum, and M. Sitti, “Soft actuators for small-scale robotics,” Advanced Materials, vol. 29, no. 13, p. 1603483, 2017.
• Wang, J. Giltinan, S. Zakharchenko, and M. Sitti, “Dynamic and programmable self-assembly of micro-rafts at the air-water interface,” Science Advances, vol. 3, no. 5, e1602522, 2017.
• Song, D. M. Drotlef, C. Majidi, and M Sitti, “Controllable load sharing for soft adhesive interfaces on three-dimensional surfaces,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, vol. 114 no. 22, pp. E4344–E4353, May 2017.
• Lum, Z. Ye, X. Dong, H. Marvi, O. Erin, W. Hu, and M. Sitti, “Shape-programmable magnetic soft matter,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, vol. 113, pp. E6007–E6015, 2016.
• Amjadi, K.-U. Kyung, I. Park, and M. Sitti, “Stretchable, skin-mountable, and wearable strain sensors and their potential applications,” Advanced Functional Materials, vol. 26, pp. 1678-1698, 2016.
• Sitti, H. Ceylan, W. Hu, J. Giltinan, M. Turan, S. Yim, and E. Diller, “Biomedical applications of untethered mobile milli/microrobots,” Proceedings of the IEEE, vol. 103, no. 2, pp. 205-224, 2015.
• Tasoglu, E. Diller, S. Guven, M. Sitti, and U. Demirci, “Untethered micro-robotic coding of three-dimensional material composition,” Nature Communications, vol. 5, article no. 3124, 2014.