About me:
I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Tsinghua University (Beijing, China). Before joining Tsinghua, I was a Research Associate working with Professor Robert Wood in both the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) at Harvard University (2015-2022). I was also affiliated with the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), working with Professor Daniela Rus (2014-2022).
I received my Ph.D. degree in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Northwestern Polytechnical University (Xi’an, China) in 2013. I also studied in the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Cornell University as a visiting Ph.D. student (2008-2009) and a Postdoctoral Fellow (2014), both under the supervision of Professor Hod Lipson (now at Columbia University).
News:
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03/2023 Multiple PhD and Postdoc positions are available in my lab at Tsinghua. Feel free to contact me via email: lisglab AT tsinghua.edu.cn, if you're interested in joining us to work on the projects in Soft Robotics, Collective Robotics, and Origami Robotics, etc.
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02/2023 Our origami robotics study is featured in a great article in National Geographic Magazine (February 2023 issue) ! See the issue: "The Future is Folded -- How origami is reshaping our world".
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07/2022 I recently joined Tsinghua University (Beijing, China) as a tenure-track associate professor.
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12/2021 Two images from our research have been selected as the covers for Soft Robotics journal (six covers per year). See the cover images for the 2021 June issue, and the December issue.
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08/2020 Our invited review is published in Science Robotics. In this short review article, we discussed power-actuation integration strategies for untethered microrobots. See the article here.
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06/2019 Our "Tension Pistons" paper is published in Advanced Functional Materials. We reinvented the 300-year-old pistons by replacing rigid parts with origami-inspired soft muscles. The new "Tension Pistons" are more forceful and energy-efficient. See the news report here.
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03/2019 Our "Particle Robotics" paper is published in Nature (see the web page and read-only pdf), and it is featured as the cover story for the March 21 issue of the journal. Please see the news and video from Nature, and the reports from MIT News and Columbia Engineering.
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03/2019 "Robot hand is soft and strong" --We will present our OMG paper (Origami Magic-ball Gripper) in this year's ICRA in Montreal, Canada. This work is done by 4 freshman undergraduates I supervised at MIT and Harvard, see the MIT News report here.
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12/2018 I gave an invited presentation and demo on "Soft & Strong Robots" to the NSF program directors, officers, and science writers at the National Science Foundation (NSF) headquarters in Alexandria, VA.
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07/2018 I gave an invited talk "Deformable and Reconfigurable Robotics" in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford University.
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07/2018 Our origami robots and soft robots have been featured in BBC Click "What AI have MIT been creating?", see our robots' video and the full episode from YouTube.
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04/2018 I demonstrated our "Macro-Soft" robots to Mr. Bill Gates during his visit at Harvard, see the news photos here.
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01/2018 My recent "origami-inspired artificial muscles" work has been highlighted in three different Nature journals: Nature, Nature Physics, and Nature Reviews Materials.
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01/2018 CBS This Morning features our recent study, see the report from CBS News' Tony Dokoupil.
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12/2017 The "origami-inspired artificial muscles" research has been covered by hundreds of news outlets, including NPR, BBC, Newsweek, Forbes, Wired, HuffPost, Science Friday, Fortune, Popular Science, etc.
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11/2017 Our paper "Fluid-driven origami-inspired artificial muscles" is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), see the paper, and news article/video from Wyss Institute.
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10/2017 The "origami exoskeleton" study has been featured in The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Fox News, BBC, Scientific American, New Scientist, TechCrunch, Engadget, etc.