Kaitlyn Becker

Kaitlyn Becker will join the Department of Mechanical Engineering as an assistant professor in August 2022. Becker received her PhD in material science and mechanical engineering from Harvard University in 2021 and previously worked in industry as a manufacturing engineer at Cameron Health and a senior engineer for Nano Terra, Inc. She is a postdoctoral scholar at the Harvard University School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and is also currently a senior glassblowing instructor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT. Becker works on adaptive soft robots for grasping and manipulation of delicate structures from the desktop to the deep sea. Her research focuses on novel soft robotic platforms, adding functionality through innovations at the intersection of design and fabrication. She has developed novel fabrication methodologies and mechanical programming methods for large integrated arrays of soft actuators capable of collective manipulation and locomotion, and demonstrated integration of microfluidic circuits to control arrays of multi-channel, 2DOF soft actuators. Becker received the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship in 2015, the Microsoft Graduate Women’s Scholarship in 2015, the Winston Chen Graduate Fellowship in 2015, and the Courtlandt S. Gross Memorial Scholarship in 2014.