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Education
(curriculum vitae)
Other projects I have been involved in include a frog-inspired hopping rover for interplanetary exploration for NASA with Paolo Fiorini and Joel Burdick. I also have pages about past engineering projects and art.
Professional biography
Sawyer Fuller creates biologically-inspired sensors, control systems, and mechanical designs targeted at insect-sized air and ground vehicles, and investigates the flight systems of aerial insects. He completed his Ph.D. in Biological Engineering at the California Institute of Technology and B.S. and M.S. degrees in Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and postdoctoral training at Harvard. In addition to his work in insect flight control, he also developed a frog-hopping robot at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and invented an ink-jet printer capable of fabricating millimeter-scale 3D metal machines at the MIT Media Lab. His award-winning work at the intersection of robotics and biology has appeared in journals such as Science, Science Robotics and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Personal notes
I grew up mostly in Central California, graduating from Morro Bay High School. I have lived in Guatemala, Florida, Massachusetts, Italy, and Seattle. My dad was boat builder Kirk Fuller. He designed and built sailing catamarans like the Podcat with a philosophy that held conventional wisdom in suspicion. He passed away in 2019. My mom was Patrice Engle, a professor of psychology and Senior Officer for Child Development at UNICEF where she worked on the science and policy of global child development. She passed away from non-smoking lung cancer in 2012. A dissertation grant was created in her honor for Ph.D. students interested in early child development in low- or middle-income countries.
Other things about me are that I really like riding bicycles, and I am less enthusiastic about cars because there are too many of them. My favorite sports are soccer and ultimate frisbee, and sometimes I make art. When I get a chance I love being in the water, whether it's charging deep (that is, surfing), sailing, windsurfing, or kayaking.
Relation to R. Buckminster Fuller
Richard
Buckminster
Fuller was an architect, mathematician, entrepreneur, and author (and Harvard dropout). Both the 60-carbon "Buckminsterfullerene" molecule and I were named after him, but neither of us has any known relation. Buckminsterfullerene was discovered after his death and was named because of its resemblance to his geodesic dome. But Fuller and I were alive at the same time, so you can judge for yourself if there's any resemblance in this picture : ).
My favorite part about Buckminster Fuller was how he made it a point to question convention. For example, why should buildings be square? One of his most famous ideas was to rely on the intrinsic strength of triangles to efficiently enclose space, like on the geodesic dome. But his main concern was poverty. He believed that technology was advanced enough that the cost of being poor should not be a lack of basic needs like food, water, or medicine. That so many still did not have these essentials, including his own daughter who died at a young age, indicated that radical thinking was required. The solution lay in a combination of entrepreneurship, commerce, and focus on environmental sustainability. Here are some of his videos on Youtube.
Miscellaneous
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