Jamie Paik

Timeline

1. By 2011

   Education and the JAiMY tool

   Born in Canada, she grows up in Seoul, Tokyo, and Vancouver, earns an engineering certificate and a master’s degree at the University of British Columbia, and completes a PhD at Seoul National University. Under a Samsung Electronics mandate, she works on the mechanical design of a 3.7-kilogram humanoid arm. During a postdoctoral appointment at Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, she develops JAiMY, an endoscopic surgery tool used for internal sutures during laparoscopy; it reaches commercialization in 2011.

2. Since January 2012

   Founding the Reconfigurable Robotics Lab

   After a second postdoctoral appointment at Harvard’s Microrobotics Laboratory, she founds the Reconfigurable Robotics Lab at EPFL in 2012 and directs it from January 2012. Her group develops soft robots that change shape and movement in response to changing environments, including an origami sheet of 3D-printed tiles that folds into three-dimensional forms.

3. 2015

   A fully integrated Robogami

   In 2015, she coauthors “Robogami: A Fully Integrated Low-Profile Robotic Origami” with Amir Firouzeh. The thin, foldable design integrates soft actuators and a controller, with bidirectional actuation and sensing; the team assesses the components in a four-legged crawler.

4. April 2019

   Robogamis at TED2019

   At TED2019 in April 2019, she demonstrates Robogamis that roll, jump, catapult like a slingshot, and pulse like a beating heart. She describes how the thin folding robots can adapt to tasks on Earth and in space.

5. June 2023

   Mori3 for space travel

   In June 2023, her team presents Mori3, a modular origami-like robot whose triangular units can join and morph from 2D triangles into almost any 3D object. The research appears in Nature Machine Intelligence, and the team explores space uses such as communication and external repairs.

6. July 2025

   Full professor at EPFL

   In July 2025, the Board of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology promotes her to Full Professor of Mechanical Engineering in EPFL’s School of Engineering.

7. January 2026

   Surface-based robot manipulation

   In January 2026, she coauthors “Surface-based manipulation with modular foldable robots” with Ziqiao Wang, Serhat Demirtas, and Fabio Zuliani. The system uses vision feedback and closed-loop control to translate, rotate, and flip objects on modular surfaces, including soft and deformable ones; she secures funding and supervises the project.

8. As of October 2026

   Professor and lab director

   As of October 2026, she is a Full Professor of Mechanical Engineering at EPFL and directs the Reconfigurable Robotics Lab. She is a confirmed panelist at EPFL’s 2026 Engineering Research Day.