ECE Seminar: Kris Dorsey

Seminar Title: Challenges and opportunities in design in tunable, soft mechanical sensors.

Location: Zoom Link

Abstract: Physically-soft mechanical sensors are poised to unlock exciting new applications in wearable devices, robotics, and human-machine interfaces. Typically with these sensors, tuning their properties through the device geometry is a challenge. A promising development in soft mechanical sensors is hierarchically-patterned structures within the sensor, which enables both deformation selectivity and the ability to tune, and potentially reconfigure, sensing properties. Dorsey will discuss challenges and recent work related to designing and fabricating hierarchically-patterned sensors, including origami-patterned sensors. Dorsey will also present work in enhancing the stability and mechanical selectivity of stretchable sensors, and discuss applications for such sensors in wearable healthcare applications and soft robotics.   

Speaker Bio:

Kris Dorsey is an assistant professor of engineering in the Picker Engineering Program at Smith College. She was a President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley and University of California, San Diego. Dr. Dorsey graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering and earned her Bachelors of Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Olin College. She founded The MicroSMITHie Lab at Smith College to investigate micro- and miniature-scale sensor design and to prepare undergraduates for graduate study in engineering. Her current research interests include novel morphology soft sensors, stability concerns for soft-material sensors, and sensors for soft robots and wearable medical devices.  Dr. Dorsey has co-authored several publications on hyper–elastic strain sensors, novel soft lithography processes, and the stability of gas chemical sensors. In 2019, she received the NSF CAREER award.