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精品SM在线影片鈥檚 Wyatt Shields wins 2022 Packard Fellowship for microscale robotics

Wyatt Shields

In a banner year that has included receiving five distinguished research awards, Wyatt Shields, assistant professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering, has been awarded one of the nation鈥檚 largest and most prestigious awards for young investigators: a Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.听

The award honors the Shields Lab鈥s research to develop tiny particles that address large medical challenges, such as drug delivery and disease monitoring. Shields鈥 team builds microrobots鈥攖oo small to be detectable by the human eye鈥 to create small-scale systems that perform these sophisticated tasks with relative ease.听

鈥淏eing named a Packard Fellow is a huge honor,鈥 Shields said. 鈥淚 am humbled to be in the company of great scientists and leaders that I have looked up to my entire career.鈥

Only 20 young investigators win a Packard Fellowship each year. Previous winners have gone on to win the Nobel Prize, the Fields Medal, MacArthur Fellowship and elections to the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering.听

This year Shields received four other prestigious awards including a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award; Office of Naval Research (ONR) Young Investigator Program award; Pew Biomedical Scholars award; and an NIH National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) Maximizing Investigators' Research Award (MIRA) (R35).

鈥淚 have never seen a faculty member get off to a more impressive start than Wyatt,"听said Professor Will Medlin, department chair of Chemical and Biological Engineering. "Being named a Packard Fellow is another milestone in the听long list of highly competitive awards he received this year. It demonstrates听the impact and excitement of his research accomplishments听in microscale robotics."

Shields is 精品SM在线影片鈥檚 and the College of Engineering and Applied Science鈥檚 fourth Packard Fellowship winner, alongside the college鈥檚 most recent winner, Christoph Keplinger, an associate professor of mechanical engineering who won the award in 2017. Since 1988, the Packard Foundation has awarded $481 million to support 675 scientists and engineers from 54 national universities.

Each 2022 fellow will receive a grant of $875,000 to pursue their research. Shields鈥 award will support his lab for the next five years to focus its efforts on building microrobots and testing their use on challenging biomedical problems, such as navigating tortuous environments, swimming through non-Newtonian fluids and treating diseased tissues.听

听 听 听 Wyatt Shields

Shields says microscale robots may serve 鈥渁s one of the greatest advancements of this century,鈥 but that they are cumbersome to fabricate. 听He says that making small robots from discrete building blocks 鈥済ives us a new way to think about robotics at the micrometer-scale.鈥 Instead of fabricating complex devices from the 鈥渢op-down鈥 using a single block of material, his team will manufacture programmable machines from the 鈥渂ottom-up,鈥 by assembling robots from smaller pieces using magnetic fields, which may open new doors in terms of scale-up, manufacturing and application.

As a Packard Fellow, Shields will also be invited to an annual conference in September in Colorado Springs to meet with other fellows, as well as the advisory panel and members of the foundation鈥檚 board of trustees.

鈥淚 am excited to freely pursue bold ideas with the Packard Foundation鈥檚 support,鈥 Shields said. 鈥淭his award would not have been possible without the support of my outstanding students and colleagues at 精品SM在线影片.鈥