Barbara Mazzolai Wants to Build a New Field of Robotics

Throughout her career, roboticist Barbara Mazzolai has turned to nature for inspiration. Now she wants to ensure the technology she builds gives back to the environment, too.After starting her career as a biologist, a chance opportunity saw Mazzolai switch streams to engineering and become an early pioneer of bioinspired robotics. Building on her knowledge of biology’s ability to solve a diverse set of problems, she has developed robots based on octopuses, plant roots, and even seeds. “I’ve always been fascinated by living organisms, [and] by the extraordinary variety of solutions in nature, selected by the evolutionary process,” she says.Barbara MazzolaiEmployer: Italian Institute of TechnologyOccupation: Associate director for robotics; director of the Bioinspired Soft Robotics LaboratoryEducation: Master’s degree in biology, University of Pisa; master’s degree in eco-management and audit schemes, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna; Ph.D. in microsystems engineering, University of Rome Tor VergataBut Mazzolai, now the associate director for robotics at the Italian Institute of Technology, in Genoa, also believes engineering needs to reckon with its own impact on the natural world. That’…

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