Biography
Katie Byl received her B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in mechanical engineering from MIT. Her research is in dynamic systems and control, with particular interest in modeling and control techniques to deal with the inherent challenges of underactuation and stochasticity that characterize bio-inspired robot locomotion and manipulation in real-world environments. Past research funding includes DARPA’s M3 program, the DARPA Robotics Challenge (with JPL), the Army’s Institute for Collaborative Biotechnologies (ICB) and Robotics CTA programs, an NSF CAREER award (2013), the Hellman Foundation (2012), and an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in Neuroscience (2011). Katie has worked on a wide range of research topics in the control of dynamic systems, including magnetic bearing control, flapping-wing microrobotics, piezoelectic noise cancellation for aircraft, and vibration isolation for gravity wave detection, and she was once a professional gambler on the now-infamous MIT Blackjack Team.
