2024 Waterman Award

The US National Science Foundation (NSF) has named Dr. Rebecca Kramer-Bottiglio as one of three recipients of the 2024 Alan T. Waterman Award, the agency's highest honor. This award, named for the agency's first director, recognizes outstanding young researchers in any field of science or engineering supported by NSF. In addition to a medal, awardees receive a grant of $1 million over five years to support scientific research and advanced study.

Dr. Kramer-Bottiglio is the John J. Lee Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science at Yale University. She is recognized for groundbreaking contributions to robotics, particularly in advancing the vision and realization of machines that can evolve new capabilities in response to new tasks or a changing environment.

Kramer-Bottiglio's research blends materials science, robotics, artificial intelligence, biology, and art. She is recognized for her invention of robotic skins, which are thin, skin-like robots that can wrap around and manipulate a passive deformable core, allowing the system to respond to new task demands with morphological adaptations. She also created an amphibious turtle-inspired robot with morphing limbs that transition from flippers to legs, allowing efficient movement both in water and on land.

Using this morphing robot platform, she proved that morphological adaptation is an energetically favorable strategy for mobile robots encountering multiple environments. Her achievements range from innovations at the level of individual components, such as distributed sensors, phase-changing actuators, and stretchable electronics, to new algorithms for embodied intelligence to discover effective behavioral control policies for mutable body morphologies.

Dr. Kramer-Bottiglio has received multiple awards including the NSF Career Award, the NASA Early Career Award, the AFOSR Young Investigator Award, and the ONR Young Investigator Award. She was named to the Forbes "30 under 30" list for her approach to manufacturing liquid metals through printable emulsions and scalable sintering methods.

Her development of robotic skins that turn inanimate objects into multifunctional robots was recognized with the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on early-career scientists and engineers. She was named a National Academy of Engineering Gilbreth Lecturer in 2022 and a National Academy of Science Kavli Fellow in 2023. She also serves on the Technology, Innovation & Engineering Committee of the NASA Advisory Council.

The Alan T. Waterman Award will enable Dr. Kramer-Bottiglio to pursue new interdisciplinary and high-risk research, and to continue to reimagine conventional ideas of what a robot -- or a roboticist -- can be.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.