MechE Colloquium with Kaitlyn Becker: Fabrication-Integrated Design for Mechanical Systems Made from Unconventional Materials

Date: Friday, September 18, 2026 Location: 3-270 Time: 3:30pm-4:30pm ET Speaker: Kaitlyn Becker Affiliation: Assistant Professor, MIT Mechanical Engineering Host: Professor Sanjay Sarma Affiliation: Professor, MIT Mechanical Engineering Talk title: Fabrication-Integrated Design for Mechanical Systems Made from Unconventional Materials Abstract: Fabrication history can fundamentally determine the geometry, interfaces, defects, reliability, and performance of mechanical systems. The Fabrication-Integrated Design Lab (FIDL) at MIT extends concepts from traditional Design for Manufacturing (DFM) to explore how the performance of structures and machines emerges from the coupled interaction of design, materials, and fabrication processes. In developing mechanical systems made from unconventional materials, from soft robots for deep-sea exploration to glass masonry, we treat manufacturing as a central variable in the design and development process. Through examples in soft robotics, I will show how fabrication-aware computational design, new molding processes, and materials-selection and interface-processing strategies can expand accessible design spaces and improve reliability. I will also demonstrate how these ideas enable system-level integration of sensing, mechanical programming, and untethered power. Finally, I will extend these principles to additive manufacturing with recycled glass, illustrating how fabrication-integrated thinking can bridge seemingly disparate material systems and contribute to broader frameworks for designing reliable mechanical systems whose behavior is inseparable from how they are made. Biography: Kaitlyn Becker is an assistant professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at MIT, holds a class of 1948 Career Development Professorship, and leads the Fabrication-Integrated Design Lab at MIT. She works on gentle and adaptive soft robots for grasping and manipulation from the desktop to the deep sea and focuses on novel soft robotic platforms that add functionality through innovations at the intersection of design and fabrication. Her soft robots have explored oceans depths down to 3.5km and were featured on the covers of the journals Soft Robotics and Advanced Functional Materials, and in the Unseen Oceans special exhibit in the American Natural History Museum. She was a recipient of the Ruth and Joel Spira Award for Excellence in Teaching, a 2024 IEEE RoboSoft Rising Star award, and the Doherty professorship in Ocean Utilization. Prior to joining the Mechanical engineering department at MIT, she completed her PhD at Harvard in the Microrobotics Lab in 2021.