About me

I am an incoming tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, starting in January 2027, where I will also be part of UTK’s Foundational AI Cluster. I am currently a Postdoctoral Associate in the Rebecca Kramer-Bottiglio Group — at Yale University through mid-2026 and continuing at Princeton University (2026–2027). I completed my Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering in the Alex Chortos Group at Purdue University.

We are hiring! PhD students and postdocs: My lab at UTK (Jue’s Lab website), starting in 2027, is recruiting PhD students and postdoctoral researchers. Motivated undergraduate and master’s researchers are also welcome. If you are excited about soft robotics, amphibious and bio-inspired robots, or embodied/physics-informed AI, please reach out to me at jw4556@princeton.edu.

My future lab (lab website) will focus on building intelligent, bio-inspired soft robotic systems by combining embodied AI, physics-informed AI, mechanical intelligence, advanced manufacturing, and flexible electronics. More specifically, I aim to develop soft robots with co-intelligence at both the body and brain levels: a body that can actively morph, sense, and adapt through smart structures and integrated electronics, and a brain that can learn, control, and make decisions through AI by leveraging the intelligence of the body. My work spans machine learning, shape morphing, soft and bio-inspired robotics, amphibious locomotion, wearable sensing, bioreactors, 3D printing, and flexible electronics, and has appeared in journals such as Nature Reviews Materials, Science Advances, Nature Communications, Advanced Intelligent Systems, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, and IEEE Transactions on Robotics, with work under review at Science Robotics, Nature Machine Intelligence, and Nature Sensors.

Current research — full-envelope amphibious locomotion. At Princeton, I am developing LUART (Learning Untethered Amphibious Robotic Turtle), a morphing robotic turtle that actively switches its limbs between inflated, stiff legs for walking and deflated, flat flippers for swimming. My current interests include:

• On land: Softness surrogates, such as effective leg length and friction, let soft limbs be learned in rigid-body simulators. Body-height control compensates for the softness, giving agile, adaptive, energy-efficient locomotion monitored by the real-time cost of transport (COT).
• In water: Pressure-regulated waterproof hardware operates from the surface to 10 m depth. Swimming gaits are learned from hand-designed seed gaits by reinforcement learning, moving toward full 3D attitude and speed control.
• At the transition: Energy-aware Morph–Energy–Path–Gait (MEPG) planning decides where and when to morph, so that total energy, including the transitions, is minimized.

Research Highlights