People
Principle Investigator
Tania Morimoto
Tania Morimoto is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and in the Department of Surgery at the University of California, San Diego. She received the B.S. degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in mechanical engineering, followed by the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford University, also in mechanical engineering. At Stanford, she worked with Allison Okamura on designing personalized flexible, continuum robots for surgical applications, as well as on the creation of a low-cost, educational haptic device.
She is a recipient of the Hellman Fellowship (2021), the NSF CAREER Award (2022), the Beckman Young Investigator Award (2022), and the ASEE Outstanding New Mechanical Engineering Educator Award (2023).
PhD Students
Ayush Giri
Ayush Giri is a PhD student working on novel designs of soft surgical robots. Ayush joined UCSD and the lab in the fall of 2019. He received his undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering from Howard University.
Email: aygiri@eng.ucsd.edu
Jui-Te (Fred) Lin
Fred Lin is a Phd student in mechanical engineering at the University of California, San Diego. His research interests lie in design, control and user interfaces for medical continuum robots. He currently focuses on designing a dual-arm concentric tube robots for laryngeal surgery. He received the B.S degree in mechanical and electro-mechanical engineering from Tamkang University, Taiwan in 2017. He received the M.S. degree in 2020 in mechanical engineering at the University of California, San Diego.
Email: jul024@eng.ucsd.edu
Robert Bloom
Robert Bloom is a PhD student in mechanical engineering at the University of California, San Diego. He is a Sloan Scholar and a GEM scholar. His current research interests are in haptics display interfaces for various healthcare applications.
Email: rlbloom@ucsd.edu
Yunti (Anna) Xu
Yunti (Anna) Xu is a PhD student in the Mechanical and Aerospace Department at UCSD. She is a recipient of the Powell Fellowship. She obtained her B.A.Sc. in Engineering Science at the University of Toronto with a Robotics major and an Artificial Intelligence minor. Her current research interests include the control and motion planning of continuum robots.
Email: ytxu@ucsd.edu
Anoush Sepehri
Anoush Sepehri is a Ph.D student in Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, San Diego. He received the B.A.Sc degree in Mechanical Engineering and Mechatronics from the University of British Columbia, Canada in 2022. His research interests are in soft and bioinspired robotics for healthcare/medical applications.
Email: asepehri@ucsd.edu
Aedan Mangan
Aedan is a PhD Student in the MAE Department at UCSD. Prior to the Morimoto Lab, he worked on Johnson & Johnson’s next-generation surgical robotic platform (Ottava). Aedan holds a Master of Bioengineering (Global Medical Innovation track) from Rice University and a Bachelor of Mechanical Engineering from the University of Dayton. During both of these he gained experience in medical device startups, Biodesign, and sustainability. Aedan’s current research interests are in the design and control of novel medical robots.
Email: amangan@ucsd.edu, LinkedIn
Karen Whirley
Karen is a PhD student in Mechanical Engineering at UC San Diego. She holds a B.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University with minors in Robotics, Biomedical Engineering, and Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Her research interests include design of soft surgical robotics.
Email: kwhirley@ucsd.edu
Postdocs
Sukjun Kim
Sukjun Kim is a postdoctoral researcher whose research focuses on development of miniaturized vine robots for surgical applications. He received his B.S. in mechanical engineering from Seoul National University in 2017, followed by the M.S and Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 2021 and 2023, respectively.
M.S. Students
Christina Chase-Markopoulou - M.S. Student, MAE
Undergraduate Students
Alex Lu- BE, GEAR Program, since Fall 2021
Karlo Gregorio - BE, since Spring 2022
Inika Shakya - BE, since Summer 2022
Kaitlyn Lavarias - MAE, RSRI Program, since Fall 2022
Zachary Huang - MAE, since Fall 2022
Parker Knopf - MAE, since Spring 2023
Noah Jones - MAE, since Spring 2023
Nathan Cramer - MAE, since Summer 2023
Trevor Matthews - MAE, since Summer 2023
Spencer Martin - MAE, since Summer 2023
Pranav Sakhuja - MAE, since Summer 2023
Medical Students
Julian Fricks - since Summer 2022
Alumni
Click here for a list of past lab members
Loki Kadomoto
Loki is the first Post Dog to join the Morimoto Lab. His research focuses on new data-driven approaches to optimizing treat consumption. He is known for taking frequent naps in his office and for making guest appearances in virtual lectures.
Michael Lin
Michael is currently a visiting scholar from Taiwan. He has over 10 years of experience in both academia and industry. His research interests include 1) investigating how to provide haptic feedback to humans via his mouth and teeth and 2) building the fastest classification algorithm to distinguish chicken wings from different shops.
Coco Park
Coco is a visiting scholar from South Korea. He is a well-known cognitive scientist dedicated to dog-human interaction. He has years of experience in communicating with humans and specializes in Korean. His current research focuses on natural language processing for humans and dogs, and he is interested in extending his work to other languages, including English.