Sandra Wells

Sandra graduated from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (Spain) in 2020 with a BSc in Physics Engineering and a BSc in Mathematics, which she pursued with an excellence scholarship from the Center for Interdisciplinary Higher Education (CFIS). During her bachelor’s studies, she conducted several research projects in a range of fields, including the synthesis and characterization of nanorobotics at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (Germany), numerical simulation methods for galactic dynamics at the University of Oxford (UK), and image analysis for ground support of the Juno mission at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (USA). For her joint bachelor’s thesis, she joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA) to work on the analysis and control of nonlinear dynamical systems.

In 2022, she graduated from ETH Zürich with a MSc in Robotics, Systems and Control, which she pursued with a “La Caixa” Spanish fellowship for postgraduate studies abroad. During her master’s, she conducted her semester project at the Robotic Systems Lab at ETH on optimal path planning for multimodal locomotion on the Moon. For her master’s thesis, she joined the Microrobotics Lab at Harvard University (USA), where she worked on the design optimization of a bioinspired microrobot achieving ultrafast motion. In the same lab, she also did a research internship in surgical robotics, where she participated in the design and fabrication of a microrobotic laser-steering device for endoscopic surgery.

Sandra joined the MSRL in September 2022 as a PhD student, where she is focusing on magnetically-guided catheters for minimally invasive surgery.