Lilly Chin

Lillian (Lilly) Chin is a graduate student at MIT, pursuing a PhD in electrical engineering and computer science in Prof. Daniela Rus’ Distributed Robotics Lab.

Born in New York City, Lilly has always enjoyed connecting disparate fields into a coherent research product. In high school, she was able to combine her biological research in cancer metastasis with her programming experience in robotics to create an agent-based computer model to simulate wound healing. She was recognized for this bioengineering work as a national finalist of the Intel Science Talent Search. This interdisciplinary bridging continued as Lilly became an undergraduate at MIT. There, she helped create a new additive manufacturing process with Prof. John Hart’s Mechanosynthesis Group, contributing significantly to the machine vision algorithms and electrical print capabilities of the mechanical system.

Currently, Lilly’s research interests are in robotics hardware and controls design, specifically developing more dexterous soft robotic actuators as well as the controls and algorithms needed to achieve complex manipulation tasks. Her ultimate career goal is to be a professor in robotics, using her broad interdisciplinary background to create more fully-integrated, self-contained robotic systems.

Outside of the lab, Lilly shoots trap with the MIT Sporting Clays Association and does informal humanities research on the intersection of old and new media forms.