If Truby could have a dream robot, it would take the form of an otter: they can swim, move on land, and manipulate objects. A close second would be a raven, or something akin to a Pokémon that could launch and return. His recent TV binge: Blue Eye Samurai. “The swordmaking scratched the material scientist side of me,” he said.
RYAN TRUBY’S CAREER HASN’T FOLLOWED the straightest line, but from his view, the turns have always made sense.
“I’ve had a very non-linear career,” he said. “If you look at it in my head, it makes a ton of sense. If you look at it on paper, as I was going through academia, it was always kind of like, are you sure you want to make that step?”
Truby started in biomedical engineering, moved into materials science, and now leads a Northwestern University lab working across soft materials, 3D printing, sensing, and robotics.
If that sounds like a lot to hold together, that is also the point. Truby says his research is not about taking one narrow technical problem and staying neatly inside it.
“Our research broadly looks at developing new materials that can advance the capabilities of robots through routes that are not necessarily traditional, computationally driven, or more driven by traditional AI,” he said.
There’s a running theme in his work, he said, of extracting lessons from biology and translating them into engineered systems. Robotics, in that sense, is a humbling place to work because nature already does many of the things engineers want machines to do, from locomotion to perception to computation.
“Nature kind of suggests that multifunctional material design strategies are required,” he said. “And if we want to make robots with these capabilities, we really work to address all of the interdisciplinary challenges from literally molecule to machine.”
The “molecule to machine” idea is a useful way to understand what makes Truby’s lab distinct. “Instead of saying, I’m going to make an artificial muscle, it’s how do I make an artificial muscle that would actually let a robot walk in an environment it’s never seen,” he said. “And so that systems level contextualization is something that I think our lab does uniquely.”
Get Physical
Some of the projects he is most excited about now focus on artificial muscle technologies, physical intelligence, soft tactile sensing, and new approaches to additive manufacturing. As robotics conversations increasingly focus on humanoids, large language models, and AI-driven control, Truby is keeping an eye on the physical side of the problem.
“There are imminent hardware challenges and at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter computationally what these things can do. If it can’t go into a physical body, the body is what’s going to limit their capabilities,” he said.
That is where materials scientists still have a major role to play. Cameras and vision systems are central to many robots today, but Truby sees opportunities for soft materials to create richer tactile information. His group is also working on soft-legged robots that can actively learn in their environment and even recover from damage.
On the manufacturing side, the implications may reach beyond soft robotics. Truby’s lab works on 3D printing methods that can create complicated structures quickly, including structures traditional methods cannot easily produce.
“One of the big things that we have really tried to push on is how can we kind of broaden access to the weird materials that we make?” he said.
At Northwestern, collaborations through the Center for Robotics and Biosystems have helped make that possible. When colleagues can put the lab’s materials directly into robots, the work moves more quickly from material curiosity to practical function.
“Getting these weird materials developed in our lab actually practical, truly functional in the hands of others, is part of that scalability problem,” he said. “But addressing the practical use problem is also, I think, a challenge for the field.”
“As junior faculty, as a millennial, I’m stuck between senior colleagues and Gen Z. I love working with our younger students. I think they’re insanely ambitious and what I wish older people would do is kind of get out of their way and mostly find a way to hand them resources and let them churn.”
—Ryan L. Truby, Assistant Professor, Northwestern University
The Kids Are All Right
For all the awards and recognition Truby has received, he is quickest to point back to the lab itself. As a junior faculty member, the proudest part has not been a single paper or honor, but watching the team take shape.
“Building a team in the way that we have is center to all of this and, you know, doing these crazy projects where we’re talking about chemistry all the way to printing and robotics all in the same lab. It takes a very special kind of gritty student to even want to do that,” he said.
His own curiosity started in a very small town in West Texas. “My grandparents had a ranch where I spent my summers just going out and playing with insects. Being able to roam free was absolutely critical to thinking, why is this ant or this grasshopper able to do the things that it does?” he said. The classroom opportunities to explore those questions were limited, he said, so much of that interest came from self-exploration.
Now, as a teacher, Truby is especially interested in giving students room to work through open-ended problems. He describes himself as a millennial caught between senior colleagues and Gen Z, and he has strong feelings about what younger engineers need.
“I love working with our younger students. I think they’re insanely ambitious and what I wish older people would do is kind of get out of their way and mostly find a way to hand them resources and let them churn. They are very ambitious,” he said.
In his own soft materials teaching, that has meant moving beyond drawings on a board. Truby has worked to give students the chance to 3D print their own resins from scratch and connect what is on the bottle to what they are physically making.
“Students don’t want me to draw another bead in a string and call that a monomer and a polymer,” he said. “Open the chemical cabinet and show me what you can do. I see phenomenal results with that.”
Sarah Alburakeh is strategic content editor.
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