Renee Zhao
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, MECHANICAL ENGINEERING, STANFORD UNIVERSITY
RAISED BY AN ENGINEER, Renee Zhao took a childhood love for robotics and turned it into a career. This mechanical engineer can now be found featured on CNN and MIT’s 35 Under 35.
Currently working in an interdisciplinary environment with doctors to design medical devices that better benefit patients, Zhao has merged her inherited engineering mindset with her passion for robotics and mechanical design—guided by a new understanding of what doctors need. “What we care about is not exactly what they care about, and vice versa. Once I realized that misalignment, I started to retrain myself and my students,” Zhao said.
The vision Zhao has for her Stanford lab ranges from miniscule to massive: Developing endovascular robots that can navigate in blood vessels and treat diseases to using origami folding mechanisms in large-scale deployable aerospace structures. “How can we use very fundamental mechanics technologies to achieve designs that will change the way we live? That’s my vision,” Zhao said.
“My father always talked to me in ‘engineering language,’ so I got into it at a very early stage.”
Renee Zhao
Her recent work has been making headlines—a magnetically actuated amphibious millirobot with a Kresling origami design. The millirobot can fold, spin, roll, and flip, with the ability to deliver liquid medicine and transport cargo as a potential minimally invasive biomedical device—particularly useful for small environments like the gastrointestinal and urinary systems.
“Twenty years ago, we talked about mechanical engineering as simply making things,” Zhao said. “But look at society now: Engineering is building bridges between a lot of different disciplines.”
Besides the technical challenges her work presents, Zhao shared that as a female scientist and engineer, it was difficult stepping into the field. “At the start of my career, I had to work hard every day just to prove myself,” Zhao said, explaining that she pursued a mechanical engineering career because of her love for the research topics, and found it upsetting to have to prove to her colleagues that she was qualified. “Nowadays, most universities are putting emphasis on diversity to help bring in more female engineers.”
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