CoDES Lecture Series: Lillian Chin—Material Matters: Designing Robot Bodies in Dialogue with Computation

Thursday, October 16, 2025 at 4:30pm
Exley Science Center, Room 121, 265 Church Street, Middletown, Connecticut

Free and open to the public.

Wesleyan’s College of Design and Engineering Studies (CoDES) presents a lecture by Lillian Chin, Assistant Professor and Texas Instrument/Jack Kilby Fellow, Chandra Family Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, entitled Material Matters: Designing Robot Bodies in Dialogue with Computation. She is interested in designing robotic bodies and their materials for optimized interaction with their environment through embedded perception and computational design. Lillian received her bachelors, masters and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. From 2023_2024, she worked as a Schmidt Science Fellow at the National Institutes of Health under Leo Cohen and Tom Bulea.

She is the recipient of several fellowships including the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, the Hertz Foundation Graduate Fellowship and the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans. Her work has been published in Science and Science Advances and has been recognized with awards such as the 2019 IEEE Robosoft Best Poster Award, the 2019 ACM CS and Law Best Paper Award and the 2022 Leventhal City Prize. Lillian has also focused heavily in research mentorship, mentoring 21 undergraduates and 2 masters students over her PhD to write 8 papers. Nearly two thirds of these students were women and other gender minorities, nearly half were underrepresented racial minorities, and a third were co-authors on papers.

Co-sponsored by The College of Design and Engineering Studies and The Department of Mathematics and Computer Science

Learn more about CoDES Lecture Series.