Prof. Metin Sitti receives Rahmi Koç Medal of Science

The third Koç University Rahmi M. Koç Medal of Science was presented to Professor Metin Sitti for his groundbreaking biomedical work with micro- and nanotechnologies in human health improvement in the overlapping fields of science, engineering and technology, on November 21, 2018.

Selection Commitee
The members of the Selection Commitee for the 2018 Medal were: Prof. Mehmet Toner (Harvard University Medical School), Prof. Ataç İmamoğlu (ETH-Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich), Prof. Cezmi A. Akdiş (Zurich University) Prof. Yusuf Leblebici (Lozan (EPFL- École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne & President of Sabancı University) ve Prof. Umran İnan (President of Koç University).

About Prof. Metin Sitti
Sitti was born in Turkey in 1970. He received his BSc and MSc degrees in electrical and electronics engineering from Boğaziçi University in Istanbul in 1992 and 1994. He left Turkey in 1996 to do his Ph.D. in electrical engineering at the University of Tokyo in 1999. After that he went to the US as a research scientist at University of California at Berkeley, where he worked until 2002. During 2002-2014, he was a professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, USA. In 2014, he founded the Physical Intelligence Department as a Director at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart.

In his research, Sitti aims to understand the underlying principles of design, locomotion, and control of small-scale mobile robots made of smart and soft materials. Intelligence of such robots mainly come from their physical design, materials, mechanisms, adaptation, and self-organization more than to their computational intelligence. Such physical intelligence methods are essential for small-scale milli- and micro-robots especially due to their inherently limited on-board computation, actuation, powering, perception, and control capabilities. Sitti envisions his novel small-scale robotic systems to be applied in healthcare mainly, where such untethered milli/micro-robots would access hard-to-reach or unprecedented sites inside the human body for local active disease diagnosis, monitoring, and treatment non-invasively.

Please click to watch the film introducing Prof. Metin Sitti.

Please click to watch Prof. Metin Sitti’s seminar on November 22, 2018.