Metin Sitti

Timeline

1. 1992–1999

   Degrees from Boğaziçi and Tokyo

   He earns a BSc in 1992 and an MSc in 1994 in electrical and electronics engineering at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul. At the University of Tokyo, he completes a PhD in electrical engineering in 1999.

2. 1999–2014

   Professor at Carnegie Mellon

   From 1999 to 2002, he is a research scientist at UC Berkeley. He then spends 2002 to 2014 at Carnegie Mellon University as assistant, associate and full professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Robotics Institute, receiving an NSF CAREER Award in 2005 and becoming an IEEE Fellow in 2014.

3. 2009–2015

   Founding nanoGriptech

   In 2009, he founds nanoGriptech, a Carnegie Mellon spinoff built on nearly a decade of his work on biologically inspired micro/nanostructured adhesives. The Pittsburgh company launches Setex in August 2015, a dry, reusable adhesive whose glue-free fibers mimic gecko foot hair.

4. 2014–2023

   Physical Intelligence at Max Planck

   He directs the Physical Intelligence Department at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart from 2014 to 2023, studying the design, locomotion, control, perception and learning of small-scale mobile robots. In 2018, his team reports in Nature magnetically controlled soft robots, 4 mm long, that roll, walk, jump and swim like a jellyfish. Koç University gives him its Rahmi M. Koç Medal of Science in 2018.

5. 2019–2020

   ERC grant and Falling Walls award

   In March 2019, he receives an ERC Advanced Grant, and his team wins the 2019 Best Paper Award at the Robotics: Science and Systems conference for a baby jellyfish-inspired soft millirobot with medical functions. He also joins ETH Zurich as a professor in 2020. In November 2020, Falling Walls presents him its Breakthrough of the Year Award in Engineering and Technology.

6. May 2023

   Cambridge lecture on physical intelligence

   In May 2023, he gives a Cambridge Information Engineering Distinguished Lecture on physically intelligent robots at the milli- and microscale. The talk covers intelligence encoded in a robot's body: light-powered and bacteria-driven microswimmers, self-sensing and self-adapting soft millirobots, and mechanical computing with bistable metastructures.

7. Since 2023

   President of Koç University

   In fall 2023, he becomes president and professor of Koç University in Istanbul. He joins the US National Academy of Engineering in 2024. As Koç president, he meets Kyoto University president Nagahiro Minato in October 2025 to discuss research collaboration and student exchange.

8. January 2026

   Hydrogel cilia in Nature

   In January 2026, he coauthors a Nature paper on 3D-printed hydrogel microcilia that bend within milliseconds at voltages down to 1.5 V and move fluids and particles at the micrometre scale. Wenqi Hu of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology leads the study, with partners at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and Koç University, where Sitti serves as president.