Robert Wood receives Max Planck-Humboldt Medal
In the inaugural award ceremony held Wednesday in Berlin, Robert Wood, together with the American mathematician Sam Payne, received the Max Planck-Humboldt Medal, and British astrophysicist Catherine Heymans received the Max Planck-Humboldt Research Award. The prestigious prizes, which are funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMFT), recognize extraordinary scientists with outstanding future potential. As an electrical engineer and roboticist, Wood has made numerous critical contributions to the field of robotics, and specifically to the subfield of soft robotics that focuses on the design of robots using highly compliant materials. Inspired by the ways in which living organisms move and adapt to their surroundings, soft robots have the potential to be used in many real-world applications for which rigid robots are not suitable. Wood and his team at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have worked...