Buse Aktaş

Buse Aktaş is an engineer and artist, and a Max Planck Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, where she leads the Robotic Composites and Compositions (RoCoCo) Group. She has an educational background in mechanical engineering, visual arts, and design; work experience in the home appliances industry; and apprenticeships in traditional crafts such as broommaking and locksmithing. Her interdisciplinary training informs a research agenda at the intersection of materials science, robotics, design, and artistic practice, with a focus on the development of active material systems that enable programmable mechanical behavior. Her research has focused on developing new families of materials and structures that enhance the mechanical interactions between robots and their environments. In particular, she has explored multidimensional, tunable mechanical behavior using jamming—a phenomenon in which clusters of components undergo phase transitions based on their internal interactions. She has designed, modeled, fabricated, and tested jamming-based functional metamaterials, and demonstrated their capabilities in robotic manipulators, wearable and surgical medical devices, and interactive art installations. She holds a Ph.D. in Engineering Sciences with a secondary field in Critical Media Practice from Harvard University, an M.A. in Design from Kadir Has University, and a B.S.E. in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering with a certificate in Visual Arts from Princeton University. She has also been actively involved in engineering education—conducting classroom-based research on active learning, mentoring and training instructors with a focus on equity and inclusion as a Pedagogy Fellow at Harvard’s Bok Center, and serving as Lecturer for the core Mechanics of Materials course. Aktaş is a member of the Elisabeth Schiemann Kolleg and has received the ETH Zurich Postdoctoral Fellowship, along with multiple awards for academic innovation, teaching excellence, and transdisciplinary research.