Ann Sychterz
Main research area: Application of New Materials and Technologies
Biography
Ann Sychterz(SICK-tesh) obtained her PhD in 2018 from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) addressing the novel use of control algorithms, statistical diagnostic tools, and real-time feedback on a full-scale tensegrity structure to enable smooth deployability, damage detection, adaptation, and learning. During her masters of applied science obtained in 2014 at the University of Waterloo, she built full-scale aluminum pedestrian bridges for vibration characterization and control. She completed a postdoctoral position at the University of Michigan on actuator optimization of adaptive origami structures. With her team at Sychterz Modular Adaptive Resilient Transformable Infrastructure (SMARTI) lab at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, they harness geometrically nonlinear systems, such as tensegrity structures and origami, for adaptive civil infrastructure. She is a faculty affiliate with Mechanical Science and Engineering, faculty fellow of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and a faculty affiliate of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology in the Autonomous Materials Systems group.