Buse Aktas

Buse is from Edirne, Turkey. During her Bachelor’s Degree at Princeton University, she majored in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering with a certificate in Visual Arts. After that she worked in a household appliance company (Arçelik), designing and implementing new human-centric product development processes. During her Master’s Degree in Design at Kadir Has University, she focused on artistic research and cultural heritage with a thesis that proposed a novel contemporary way to engage with traditional craft practices.

She joined the Harvard Biorobotics Lab for her PhD in Mechanical Engineering and Material Science with a secondary field in Critical Media Practice. She focused on designing, modeling, fabricating and testing a family of jamming-based tunable functional metamaterials which enable more versatility for robot-environment and robot-human interactions, primarily by selectively exploiting passive mechanics in different degrees of freedom. She has also been involved with engineering education through: conducting research studies in undergraduate classrooms to assess the efficacy of different active learning activities, helping mentor and train teachers with a focus on equity and inclusion (as a Pedagogy Fellow at the Bok Center), and leading a Mechanics of Materials course at Harvard University as a lecturer.

She joined MSRL in September 2022 as an ETH Postdoctoral Fellow to apply her experience in tunable metamaterials to magnetically steered catheters and microrobots.