Lilly Chin

Lillian (Lilly) Chin will begin as a tenure-track assistant professor at The University of Texas at Austin’s Electrical and Computer Engineering Department in September 2024.

During her gap year, she will be working as a postdoc at the National Institutes of Health in neuroscience/clinical rehabilitation through the Schmidt Science Fellows program.

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.

Chin’s graduate work focused on designing robotic bodies and their materials for optimized interaction with their environment through embedded perception and computational design. She utilized recent advances in mechanical metamaterials as the foundation to computationally build new materials for robots.

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.