Metin Sitti

Sitti is an acclaimed scientist. On November 9, 2020, exactly 31 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Sitti was presented with the «Breakthrough of the Year» Award 2020 in the Engineering and Technology category by the Falling Walls World Science Summit. In March 2019, he received a prestigious Advanced Grant from the European Research Council (ERC), which is awarded only to established researchers with a proven track record of excellence. In terms of the originality and significance of research contributions, grant recipients are exceptional leaders in their given fields. What is more, Sitti and his team recently received the Best Paper Award at the prestigious Robotics Science and Systems Conference for their invention of a baby jellyfish-inspired soft millirobot with medical functions.

Second, there is the Mobile Millirobots thrust where the robots are often down to 1 mm in size. Metin Sitti and his team look at insects, lizards, jellyfish, and many other small-scale organisms and try to understand the animal´s locomotion principles and apply that knowledge to create robots at the small scale. There are also inventions such as a soft capsule robot, which looks much like a pill. One day, a patient could be able to swallow this capsule and it could take samples of a tumor inside the stomach. One of the main breakthroughs in this thrust area is a soft millirobot named Wormmate that is able to achieve seven different locomotions at the same time in multiple terrains (solid ground, water, water surface) inspired by soft-bodied small organisms. Sitti and his team are currently working on using this and other tiny robots to one day navigate through unprecedented and hard-to-reach regions inside the body under ultrasound or x-ray medical imaging for minimally invasive medical operations. This robotic breakthrough was published in Nature in 2018 and made the headlines all across the world.

Sitti also received the Rahmi Koç Medal of Science (2018), Best Paper Award in the Robotics Science and Systems Conference (2019), IEEE/ASME Best Mechatronics Paper Award (2014), SPIE Nanoengineering Pioneer Award (2011), Best Paper Award in the IEEE/RSJ Intelligent Robots and Systems Conference (1998, 2009), and NSF CAREER Award (2005). He is the editor-in-chief of both Progress in Biomedical Engineering and Journal of Micro-Bio Robotics, and an associate editor for both Science Advances and Extreme Mechanics Letters.

Metin Sitti is the Director of the Physical Intelligence Department at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart, he founded the department in 2014. He is also a Professor in the Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering at ETH Zurich, a professor at the School of Medicine and College of Engineering at Koç University and co-founder of Setex Technologies Inc. based in Pittsburgh, USA.

Metin Sitti co-founded nanoGriptech Inc. in Pittsburgh, USA in 2012 to commercialize his lab’s gecko-inspired microfiber adhesive technology as a new disruptive adhesive material (branded as Setex®) for a wide range of industrial applications. The company was renamed as Setex Technologies Inc. in 2021.

Sitti received his BSc and MSc degrees in electrical and electronics engineering from Boğaziçi University in Istanbul in 1992 and 1994, respectively, and his Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Tokyo in 1999. He was a research scientist at UC Berkeley from 1999 to 2002 and a professor at the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University from 2002 to 2014. He became a Director at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart in 2014.