{"id":600,"date":"2026-06-02T16:10:21","date_gmt":"2026-06-02T23:10:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.magicalrobot.org\/BeingHuman\/?p=600"},"modified":"2026-06-02T16:18:23","modified_gmt":"2026-06-02T23:18:23","slug":"here-come-synthetic-muscles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.magicalrobot.org\/BeingHuman\/2026\/06\/here-come-synthetic-muscles","title":{"rendered":"Here come Synthetic Muscles!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I&#8217;m really excited to announce that I joined <a href=\"https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/company\/elysium-robotics\/\">Elysium Robotics<\/a> as Chief Science Officer back in April 2026. I left my Tensegrity Robotics lab at NASA almost a decade ago on a quest to find the artificial muscle fiber technology that I need to build the dexterous and graceful robots of our dreams. This adventure took me through synthetic biology, computational chemistry, quantum computing, polymer design, microfluidics, and more. When I first met <a href=\"https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/in\/rodrigoalvarez\/\">Rodrigo Alvarez-Icaza<\/a> a few years ago I immediately saw that he was building the technology I had been looking for, and I knew that we would eventually work together when the time was right. That time is today, and I&#8217;m delighted. We are going to build amazing and transformative robotic systems together, it is going to be fun.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Most interesting is how many of the new fields of science I learned during this decade long adventure turn out to be highly relevant to the electroactive polymer science and microfluidic manufacturing innovations we are maturing at Elysium.   While I felt a little lost at times in recent years, wondering how I had travelled so far from my core passion for bio-robotics, it turns out that I was just busy learning the skills I needed, and that I&#8217;ve ended up exactly where I set out for a decade ago.  I love science, and I love that the world is full of magic and mystery.  Its a good combination.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m really excited to announce that I joined Elysium Robotics as Chief Science Officer back in April 2026. I left my Tensegrity Robotics lab at NASA almost a decade ago on a quest to find the artificial muscle fiber technology that I need to build the dexterous and graceful robots of our dreams. This adventure [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-600","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-unknown"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pShAo-9G","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.magicalrobot.org\/BeingHuman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/600","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.magicalrobot.org\/BeingHuman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.magicalrobot.org\/BeingHuman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.magicalrobot.org\/BeingHuman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.magicalrobot.org\/BeingHuman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=600"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.magicalrobot.org\/BeingHuman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/600\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.magicalrobot.org\/BeingHuman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=600"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.magicalrobot.org\/BeingHuman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=600"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.magicalrobot.org\/BeingHuman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=600"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}