Mihai " Mishu" Duduta is an assistant professor in the School of
Mechanical, Aerospace, and Manufacturing Engineering at the University of
Connecticut. He completed a BS in Materials Science and Engineering at MIT, then
became the first employee of 24M Technologies, a start-up spun out to commercialize
a battery technology he co-invented. Four years later he started a PhD at Harvard
University, under the guidance of Profs. Robert Wood and David Clarke. His thesis,
" Dielectric Elastomer Actuators as Artificial Muscles for Soft Robotic
Applications" , included work which won a Gold Award at the Materials Research
Society Fall Meeting 2018, and was nominated for Best Paper at ICRA 2018. His
postdoctoral work at the University of Minnesota was supported by a Medical Devices
Innovation Fellowship, an NSF I-Corps grant, as well as seed funding from the
Minnesota Robotics Institute. Working with Prof. Timothy Kowalewski and clinical
collaborators, he developed novel miniaturized soft robotic tools for endo-vascular
intervention. His research group at the University of Toronto uses an
interdisciplinary approach to address fundamental challenges in soft robotics,
including actuation, sensing, and energy storage. The work is supported by grants
from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC -
Discovery Grant, Idea to Innovation), the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, the
New Frontiers Research Fund, as well as interdisciplinary seed grants. For his work
on steerable micro-catheters, he is the recipient of a 2022 Banting Foundation
