Josie Hughes wins MassRobotics Rising Star Award
Josie Hughes (center) with MassRobotics cofounder Joyce Sidopoulos (left) and Ingmar Posner of the University of Oxford (right) © MassRobotics
Josie Hughes, head of the Computational Robot Design and Fabrication Lab (CREATE Lab) in the School of Engineering, has received the 2024 Rising Star Award from the independent robotics innovation hub MassRobotics.
The Rising Star Award from MassRobotics, sponsored by Amazon Robotics, is “presented to an early-career professional woman making strides in research that will lead to significant impact in the field of robotics”. It is the world’s first major prize to recognize the impact of women in robotics research, and comes with $5,000.
Josie Hughes was selected "for her key contributions to soft robot design and fabrication, enabling robots with novel functionalities and proposing approaches that provide distributed intelligence". The prize was announced at the IEEE Robotics & Automation Society 40th Anniversary Conference (ICRA40) in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, on September 26th. A formal Gala awarding the medals and celebrating the recipients will be held in Boston, USA on October 26th.
Hughes joined EPFL as a tenure-track assistant professor in 2021 at just 29 years old, making her one of the youngest researchers to do so. She leads the CREATE Lab, which aims to develop fabrication and computational design tools for robots with new and exciting applications, such as human-like intelligent environmental interactions, and large-scale physical experimentation to understand complex phenomena. She also won the 2024 IEEE RAS Early Academic Career Award in May.