Hod Lipson promoted to Full Professor

Hod Lipson has been promoted to Full Professor of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, effective April 1, 2015.  He directs the Creative Machines Lab, which pioneers new ways to make machines that create, and machines that are creative.  He is a co-author of the book “Fabricated: The New World of 3D Printing”.  His work on self-aware and self-replicating robots, food printing, and bio-printing has received widespread media coverage including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Time, CNN, and the National Public Radio.  Lipson has co-authored over 200 technical papers and speaks frequently at high-profile venues such as TED and the US National Academies.  He has led work in areas such as evolutionary robotics, multi-material functional rapid prototyping, machine self-replication and programmable self-assembly. Lipson received his PhD from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology in 1998, and continued to a postdoc at Brandeis University and MIT.  He began his academic positon at Cornell in 2001 with a dual appointment as Assistant Professor in the Computing & Information Science department and Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering.  He served as MAE’s Associate Director from Jan. 2010 - Dec. 2012 and promoted to Associate Professor in 2008.

Prof. Lipson’s relatively broad spectrum of research projects focus on what he considers to be two “grand challenges” of engineering: (a) Can we design machines that can design other machines, and (b) Can we make machines that can make other machines. Both of these questions lie at the crux of understanding the engineering process itself, and progress on these fronts can offer huge leverage in our ability to design, make and maintain increasingly complex systems in the future. Biological life has answered these challenges in ways that dwarf the best teams of human engineers; he therefore uses primarily biologically-inspired approaches, as they bring new ideas to engineering and new engineering insight into biology.