Bergbreiter named director of Maryland Robotics Center

Associate Professor Sarah Bergbreiter (ME/ISR) has been named director of the Maryland Robotics Center, effective January 2016. She succeeds Professor S.K. Gupta (ME/ISR), the founding and current director, who recently accepted an appointment at the University of Southern California.

Bergbreiter is a highly visible faculty member who brings an impressive record of expertise, research and leadership accomplishments to the position.

Her research interests are in microrobotics, micro-electro-mechanical systems, microactuators, soft robotics, robot locomotion, networked centimeter-scale robots and millimeter-scale power systems. She came to the University of Maryland in 2008 and earned tenure in 2014. Bergbreiter is the recipient of a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 2013; an NSF CAREER Award for "Microrobot Legs for Fast Locomotion over Rough Terrain,” in 2011; and a DARPA Young Faculty Award in 2008.

NSF’s Science Nation online magazine featured Bergbreiter’s work in the video, ”As fast as their tiny ‘bot’ legs will carry them!”. She also gave a TED Talk on her microrobotics research at TEDYouth 2014: Worlds Imagined.

Bergbreiter was the principal investigator for an NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduates in microrobotics, and is the director of the new Robotics Realization Lab.

The Maryland Robotics Center is an interdisciplinary research center housed in the Institute for Systems Research within the A. James Clark School of Engineering. The center’s mission is to advance robotic systems, underlying component technologies, and applications of robotics through research and educational programs that are interdisciplinary in nature and based on a systems approach. The center's research activities include all aspects of robotics including development of component technologies (e.g., sensors, actuators, structures, and communication), novel robotic platforms, and intelligence and autonomy for robotic systems. Research projects in the center are supported by the major federal funding agencies including NSF, ARO, ARL, ONR, AFOSR, NIH, DARPA, NASA, and NIST.

Published December 23, 2015