soft robots
Mihai "Mishu" Duduta
CRANIA
Mihai "Mishu" Duduta
Mihai “Mishu” Duduta joined the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering as an Assistant Professor in May 2021. He completed his PhD at Harvard University, with a thesis focused on novel dielectric elastomer actuators (DEAs) materials for soft robotic applications. The technology developed during his PhD became the focus of a collaboration with Facebook and Oculus to build soft wearable haptic devices. His work on autonomous robots powered by DEAs was nominated for best paper at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, and he won the Gold Award at the Materials Research Society Fall Meeting for his work on novel DEA materials. After that Mishu was a medical devices innovation fellow at University of Minnesota – Twin Cities where he developed soft robotic tools for endovascular interventions. Before graduate school, Mishu was the first employee of 24M Technologies, a battery start-up company in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The company is successfully commercializing a semi-solid battery electrode technology co-invented by Mishu during his undergraduate studies in Materials Science and Engineering at MIT.