A bronze tiger sculpture in the foreground with Princeton's Stanhope Hall

Board approves 2 new faculty appointments

By the Office of Communications on April 2, 2026, 12:23 p.m.
Photo by
Matthew Raspanti, Office of Communications

The Princeton University Board of Trustees has approved the appointment of two faculty members, including one full professor and one assistant professor.

Professor

Rebecca Kramer-Bottiglio, in mechanical and aerospace engineering, specializes in robotics. Her appointment is effective July 1.

Kramer-Bottiglio comes to Princeton from Yale University, where she has taught since 2017, most recently as the John J. Lee Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering. Prior to that, she was an assistant professor at Purdue University from 2013 to 2017 and a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University in 2012.

Her work focuses on the development of shapeshifting “soft robots” that mimic how animals adapt in response to changes in their tasks and environments, such as an amphibious, turtle-inspired robot whose limbs can morph to move efficiently in water and on land. Her research on soft robotics, materials science, stretchable electronics and soft material manufacturing has received grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF), NASA, the Office of Naval Research and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

Among her many honors and awards, Kramer-Bottiglio received the NSF Alan T. Waterman Award in 2024, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 2019, the NSF Early Career Award in 2015 and the NASA Early Career Award in 2014. She serves on the NASA Advisory Council’s Technology, Innovation and Engineering Committee.

Kramer-Bottiglio has served as a senior editor of the International Journal of Robotics Research since 2023 and an associate editor of Soft Robotics since 2019. She is also on the editorial or advisory boards of the journals Responsive Materials, Advanced Materials, Advanced Materials Technologies, and Advanced Intelligent Materials. 

She was a guest editor at PNAS in 2022 and an associate editor at IEEE Transactions on Robotics from 2022 to 2023, Multifunctional Materials from 2018 to 2022, Frontiers in Robotics and AI: Soft Robotics from 2017 to 2022, and IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters from 2018 to 2019.

Kramer-Bottiglio has authored more than 85 papers in journals including Nature, Science Robotics, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Advanced Functional Materials and the International Journal of Robotics Research. She has also written many conference papers and two book chapters.

She holds eight patents and has served on program and technical committees and presented at numerous conferences around the world. She has also given more than 50 invited seminars, including at Princeton.

Kramer-Bottiglio earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University, an M.S. from the University of California-Berkeley and a B.S. from Johns Hopkins University.

Assistant professor

Yunhyae Kim, in politics, joins the faculty in July. Kim specializes in political theory and holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University and a B.A. from Seoul National University.

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