Dr. Hongri (Richard) Gu is currently an Assistant Professor in the Division of Integrative Systems and Design (ISD) at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). He received his Bachelor’s degree in Mechatronics Engineering from Zhejiang University in 2014, during which he also participated in the Young Scientist Exchange Program (YSEP) at Tokyo Institute of Technology from 2012 to 2014. In 2016, he completed his Master’s degree in Micro and Nanosystems at ETH Zurich. From 2017 to 2021, Dr. Gu conducted his doctoral research at the Multi-Scale Robotics Lab, ETH Zurich, under the supervision of Prof. Bradley Nelson. During his Ph.D., he served as an editorial assistant for Science Robotics and the Annual Review of Control, Robotics, and Autonomous Systems, managing submissions in microrobotics, medical robotics, and soft robotics. From 2022 to 2024, he pursued postdoctoral research in the Department of Physics at the University of Konstanz in Germany.

Dr. Gu’s research focuses on developing structured magnetic materials and robotic systems for future disruptive medical technologies, with an emphasis on understanding multi-scale physiological transport and inventing novel medical devices and surgical tools.

Thumbnail

Ziqi Wang is an Assistant Professor at the Division of Integrative Systems and Design (ISD) at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). Before joining HKUST, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Creative Computation Lab and Sycamore at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in 2024, under the supervision of Prof. Stefana Parascho and Prof. Maryam Kamgarpour. Prior to that, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Computational Robotics Lab at ETH Zurich, advised by Prof. Stelian Coros. He obtained his Ph.D. in 2021 from the Geometric Computing Laboratory at EPFL, where he was advised by Prof. Mark Pauly. He completed his bachelor's degree in Mathematics in 2017 at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC).

Ziqi is interested in interdisciplinary projects that connect architecture, robotics, and computer graphics. His current research focuses on the computational design, analysis, and fabrication of complex assemblies, with applications ranging from toys and furniture to buildings. The goal is to create a seamless end-to-end workflow that enables users to design and fabricate personalized items using artificial intelligence and robotics. He has years of experience collaborating with researchers from various disciplines, including robotics, architecture, and civil and mechanical engineering. He has applied his research to constructing several large-scale architectural demonstrators. He has published several works in the top computer graphics journal, ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG), and received a Best Paper Honorable Mention Award at SIGGRAPH 2022.

Thumbnail