Team
The Computational Design and Fabrication Group is an interdisciplinary team of students, post-doctoral associates, and research staff from computer science, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, and materials science. The group is led by Professor Wojciech Matusik.
Faculty
Wojciech Matusik is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, where he leads the Computational Design and Fabrication Group. Before coming to MIT, he worked at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, Adobe Systems, and Disney Research Zurich. He studied computer graphics at MIT and received his PhD in 2003. He also received a BS in EECS from the University of California at Berkeley in 1997 and MS in EECS from MIT in 2001. His research interests are in direct digital manufacturing and computer graphics. In 2004, he was named one of the world’s top 100 young innovators by MIT’s Technology Review Magazine. In 2009, he received the Significant New Researcher Award from ACM Siggraph. In 2012, Matusik received the DARPA Young Faculty Award and he was named a Sloan Research Fellow.
Administrators
Meg Farmer joined the team in November 2023, and supports Wojciech Matusik and the Computational Design and Fabrication group.
Mascot
Buttercup Foshey is a 5 year old Belgian Tervuren/Poodle mix. She joined CDFG in 2017, after dropping out of Service Dog training to pursue her real passion: research! Her research interests include HCI (Hound-Couch Interaction), neural-network-based facial recognition (gatekeeping the lab and barking at unfamiliar faces!) and biomimetic soft robot autonomous locomotion in cluttered environments (wandering around the lab space!). She has left her bark at top-tier machine learning conferences including NeurIPS and ICML.
Yihui Li is a 2 year old Maine Coon. She joined CDFG at Meowsachusetts Institute of Technology in 2021, after completing her cattery training from Long Island, New York. She is interested in research in CG (cat gaming) and has contributed to papers published at top CG conferences including SIGGRAPH and SIGGRAPH Asia.
Research staff
Postdoctoral associates
Ben Jones joined CDFG in 2024 after completing his PhD in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington advised by Adriana Schulz, and Bachelors of Science degrees in Physics and Mathematics and Computer Science at Harvey Mudd College. His research interests are broad, and focus on applying computation to support invention and discovery. Currently Ben explores applying machine learning to design and proof synthesis, and in the past has worked on parametric CAD systems, automated knitting, distributed systems, computational microscopy, and space-based solar power. Outside the lab Ben can be found social dancing, bouldering, and playing guitar (mutually exclusive activities).
Crystal Owens joined CDFG as a distinguished postdoctoral fellow in the fall of 2023. Her research interests are in acoustic self-assembly, material formulation design, 3D printing, and rheology (and Oreology), and in pairing experiments with computation to advance these fields. Crystal received her B.S.E. in Mechanical Engineering from Duke University with a minor in math, and her S.M. and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from MIT, co-advised by Profs. John Hart and Gareth McKinley.
Peter Yichen Chen completed his CS PhD from Columbia, advised by Eitan Grinspun. Before that, he was a Sherwood-Prize-winning math undergrad from UCLA, working with Joey Teran. Peter is interested in the intersection of physics simulation and machine learning. Outside of research, Peter is a foodie. If he is not consuming food himself, he is probably watching mukbang videos.
Phd students
Alston Lo joined CDFG in Fall 2024 as a PhD student, coming from the University of Toronto where he obtained his Bachelor’s degree. His research interests lie in the intersection of machine learning and the life sciences, with a focus on drug discovery and structure elucidation.
Beichen Li joined CDFG as a PhD student in Fall 2018 after obtaining his Bachelor’s from Tsinghua University. He previously worked with Prof. Stelian Coros when he was a research intern at CMU in Summer 2017. Beichen’s primary research interests are automated capture and generation methods for procedural PBR materials.
DongHun Ryu is a Ph.D. student at MIT’s EECS Department. His research interest lies in the intersection of optics and algorithms for developing next-generation imaging/sensing/display systems.
Liane Makatura joined CDFG as a new PhD student in 2018 fall from Dartmouth, where she obtained her Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Mathematics.
Michael Sun joined the group in the summer of 2023. He received his BS and MS from Stanford University in 2022, where he worked with Jure Leskovec and Percy Liang. He is interested in how AI can generate better graph-structured objects — which represent molecules, social networks, materials, buildings, etc. — by learning to reverse engineer existing ones and combining knowledge from pretrained models.
Minghao Guo joined CDFG in 2021 fall as a PhD student. He obtained his Master’s degree from CUHK MMLab and Bachelor’s degree from Tsinghua University.
Pingchuan Ma joined our group in September 2019. Previously, he obtained his Bachelor’s degree from Nankai University where he worked with Prof. Ming-Ming Cheng and Prof. Bo Ren.
Yifei Li joined CDFG in September 2020. She obtained her Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, where she worked with Prof. Jessica Hodgins.
Yunsheng Tian joined CDFG in fall 2019 as a PhD student in MIT CSAIL. Previously he obtained his Bachelor’s degree from Nankai University, China.
Ms/mseng students
Devin Murphy joined CDFG in the Spring of 2024. He is interested in developing intelligent wearable systems using textile-integrated electronics, wireless communication, and multimodal signal processing/machine learning.
Alumni
Adriana Schulz is a graduate student in Computer Science at MIT. She received her MSc in Mathematics (major Computer Graphics) at IMPA in 2011, and her BS in Electronics Engineering from UFRJ in 2009. She is interested in data driven methods for fabrication.
Alex Goins joined us when he was a senior at MIT majoring in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. His interests are in computer graphics and systems software.
Alexandre Kaspar successfully defended his PhD and graduated from our group in 2021. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from EPFL in 2011 and 2014. His interests span digital tools for fabrication, human-computer interaction and machine learning.
Allan Zhao is a graduate student in computer science working on robot design and simulation. He obtained a master’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science from UC Berkeley in May 2018.
Allen Park (Google) formerly worked on adding Machine Vision to the 3D printer being fabricated in our group. He returned to the CDFG in Fall 2015 to work on fun and interesting research problems and graduated in September 2016.
Andrew Spielberg was a Ph.D. student at CDFG co-advised by Wojciech Matusik and Daniela Rus. He graduated from MIT with a Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2021.
Anying Li is working with the Computational Fabrication Group and the Computer Vision Group solving difficult technical problems related to how drivers use vision.
Bo Zhu is a postdoctoral researcher at MIT and comes to us from the Computer Science Department at Stanford University (where he received his PhD with Prof. Ron Fedkiw in June 2015). His research interests are mainly focused on computer graphics and computational physics, especially on computational fluid dynamics.
Bohan Wang is a postdoctoral associate in CDFG. His research interests are in computer graphics and animation, deformable object simulation, FEM, biomechanics, real-time simulation, geometric shape modeling and GPU computing. Bohan received his B.Eng. in Computer Science and Engineering from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Southern California, advised by Prof. Dr. Jernej Barbic.
Bojan Serafimov worked with our group when he was a freshman at MIT. His interests are algorithms and data structures.
Bolei Deng is a postdoctoral associate co-advised by Wojciech Matusik and Xuanhe Zhao. His research focuses on nonlinear dynamics, phase transitions, and inverse design of mechanical metamaterials, soft robotics, and dynamics of microscale structures. Bolei received his B.S. in Engineering Mechanics from Zhejiang University in 2016 and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering and Material Science from Harvard University in 2021, advised by Prof. Dr. Katia Bertoldi.
Bryt Bradley was an official part of the MIT Computer Graphics Group since March 1998 and re-joined the Computational Design and Fabrication Group from July 2015 to June 2017. The purview of her duties included all things logistics and harbinger-related. In June of 2017 she moved from CSAIL, in order to pursue new opportunities in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
Changil Kim joined our group in October 2016, from the Interactive Geometry Lab of ETH Zurich, led by Prof. Olga Sorkine-Hornung. Before IGL, he obtained his PhD at the Computer Graphics Laboratory of ETH Zurich and Disney Research Zurich.
David Levin was a postdoctoral associate working at MIT having received his PhD in 2012 from The University of British Columbia. He is interested in developing new algorithms and tools for physical simulation. His previous work focused on Medical Imaging and simulating highly deformable objects in contact.
Desai Chen successfully defended his PhD and graduated from our group in 2017 fall. He received his bachelor’s degree at Carnegie Mellon University in 2011. He is interested in computational fabrication and physically-based simulation.
Emma Steinhardt worked with us as a junior at MIT majoring in Mechanical Engineering. She researched the use of 3D printing technologies to manufacture mechanical assemblies.
Erin Buckley We were pleased to have Erin in our group as a temporary administrative assistant in the Spring of 2019 before she moved on to her dream job in the public sector.
Harrison Wang is an MEng student working with Adriana Schulz on developing optimization techniques for understanding and navigating performance tradeoffs.
Hui Qiao was a visiting in the Computational Design and Fabrication Group for one year starting at the end of November 2015. He worked with our QCRI projects/collaboration.
James Minor joined the CDFG group in late fall of 2015. He received his BASc in Engineering Physics from the University of Toronto in 2015. He is interested in 3D printing electronics.
Javier Ramos is a research engineer in the group. He received his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from MIT in 2012 and M.S. in 2014. During his undergraduate years, Javier worked on ultrasound imaging hardware at the Computational Instrumentation Group and on biologically inspired robotics at the d’Arbeloff Laboratory. His research interests include machine design, manufacturing systems, and digital fabrication hardware.
Jie Xu is a graduate student in Computer Science who joined the CDFG in September 2016. He obtained his Bachelor’s degree at Tsinghua University in 2016.
Kiril Vidimče is a PhD student in Computer Science. After obtaining his B.S. in Math and Computer Science and prior to his return to academia, he spent 8 years in Pixar’s R&D group working on the in-house animation, lighting and rendering tools and another 4 years in Intel’s Advanced Rendering Technologies group researching real-time rendering algorithms.
Kshama Ananthapura was the groups administrative assistant from January 2018 to January 2019 whereupon she accepted a position at a start up company.
Kui Wu joined us in 2019 summer, after obtaining his Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Utah. Kui is helping us in multiple projects with his simulation and knitting expertise.
Lara Zlokapa is a mechanical engineering graduate student at CSAIL working on designing a robotic hand. In 2020, she graduated with a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from UC Berkeley, where her research experience focused on the design of exoskeletons and prosthetics.
Liang Shi joined our group in the spring of 2017. He received his Master’s degree from Stanford University and his Bachelor’s degree from Beihang University. At Stanford University, he worked in the Computational Imaging Group directed by Prof. Gordon Wetzstein.
Louise van den Heuvel joined the group to work on the multifab project and was swiftly off and running.
Luis Trueba is joining the CompFab Group in Summer 2017. He is an engineering undergraduate student here at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and is hoping to gain engineering experience by working on challenging and exciting projects.
Maria “Masha” Shugrina was a graduate student in Computer Science, and joined the group in 2013. Masha is originally from Russia, but has spent most of her life (so far) in the United States. She received a Bachelor’s from Boston University and spent 5 years working on Speech Recognition and Maps for Google before starting graduate school. Her research interests span Computer Graphics, HCI and applied Machine Learning. In particular, she is interested in tools to facilitate creativity and design of 3D-printable objects.
Megan Tjandrasuwita is a PhD student in Computer Science who joined CDFG in 2022. She received her Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Caltech, where she worked in Prof. Yisong Yue’s machine learning group.
Mélina Skouras has joined us from the Computer Graphics Laboratory of ETH Zurich, Switzerland, where she collaborated with Disney Research Zurich. Her PhD thesis focused on the development of novel algorithms for the design of custom deformable objects.
Michael Foshey is a Mechanical Engineer with the Computational Design and Fabrication Group. Foshey’s research interests include: 1)Developing new types of additive manufacturing processes and systems that unlock new applications for 3D printing. 2)Implementing machine learning algorithms to discover, optimize, and understand new high-performance materials and processes. 3)Developing novel types of sensors to better understand how humans and robots interact with their environment.
Nick Bandiera joined the CDFG in Fall 2015 and used his MechE chops on our carbon fiber 3D printing project.
Petr Kellnhofer joined our group in January 2017 as a Post Doc and brought to our group his research experience and knowledge garnered during his successful PhD thesis work (“Perceptual modeling on stereoscopic 3D”) at MPI Informatik to enhance all of our research efforts.
Philipp Herholz’s home university is TU Berlin. He visited and studied with the MIT CSAIL Computer Graphics Group back in 2012 and returned to the area in 2015, continuing his research with various members of the MIT Computational Design and Fabrication Group.
Piotr Didyk (Saarland University / Cluster of Excellence, MMCI / Max Planck Institute for Computer Science)
Pitchaya Sitthi-amorn earned a B.S. and PhD. in computer Science from University of Virginia. He then joined the Computer Graphics group at CSAIL, MIT under Wojciech Matusik. His research interests range from real-time rendering, GPGPU and compilers to 3D printing and fabrication. He has left our group and is continuing his research at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand.
Roger joined our group as the administrative assistant in April 2019. He holds a B.S. from the University of Vermont, and an M.S. from Northeastern University.
Ruitao Su joined our group as a postdoctoral associate in 2021. His research focuses on the additive manufacturing of active electronic systems and their unconventional applications in computational graphics. Ruitao received his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, M.S. in Mechanical and Materials Engineering from the University of Cincinnati, and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Minnesota.
Rupert Deng is a Bernedoodle born in July 2021. Rupert gained his Ph.D. from Petco in March 2022 before joining the group.
Ryan Gulland joined our groups PhD student Jie Xu’s UAV project as a UROP during the summer of 2017.
Sami Alsheikh joined the CDFG in the Fall 2015 as a SuperUROP! His research focused on using newly developed radar technologies to understand different environments. Radar offers advantages over video because it doesn’t require light and has the potential to pick up on additional characteristics such as texture or material properties. Sami’s work involves taking readings with small, new high-frequency radar chips, and exploring different analysis methods to derive meaning from the data.
Skyler Adams is a junior at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His interests are automation, personal fabrication and robotics.
Stuart P Baker worked primarily with Professor John Hart in MIT’s Mechanosynthesis Group, but was also part of the CDFG where he developed new processes for fabricating micro/nano scale components as well as novel systems for additive manufacturing with us.
Subra Sundaram A graduate student in the MIT EECS department where he received his SM degree in 2014, working on MEMS oscillators. He received his undergraduate degrees in Electrical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering from BITS Pilani in India. He is interested in 3D printing functional parts.
Sung-Ho Bae joined our group in summer 2016, as a Post Doc. He came to us from KAIST in South Korea. During his post-doctoral studies, he researched image/video quality assessment/enhancement for virtual reality contents, especially with Alexandre Kaspar and Hui Qiao.
Szu-Po Wang was a Master of Engineering student in EECS and worked on new display technologies when part of our team. He graduated in February 2016.
Tae-Hyun Oh has joined our group from the summer of 2017. He received his PhD from KAIST, Korea, where he worked with Profs. In So Kweon (Robotics and Computer Vision Lab.) and Jinwoo Shin (Algorithmic Intelligence Lab.). His research interest is on machine learning and its applications.
Tao Du obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science from our group in 2021 and continued as a postdoctoral associate co-advised by Wojciech Matusik and Daniela Rus. He works on developing computational methods to solve challenging design, simulation, and control problems in complex physics systems.
Timothy Erps is a Technical Associate in our group working on methods for materials development for 3d printing.
Vahid Babaei came to us from École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. He will be working on our 3D printing initiatives. He can be reached at: babaei[at]mit.edu.
Viraji Celeste Samaratunga (Weston High School) worked in our group in the summer of 2015, investigating the printability of various food mixtures and creating CAD files for 3D printing of food.
Wan Shou was a postdoctoral associate in CDFG working on advanced materials and advanced manufacturing. His interests include but not limit to functional devices, soft robotics, wearable electronics, smart textiles, disruptive manufacturing techniques.
Wei Zhao is a Master of Engineering student in EECS. She works on design tools for fabrication.
Wenqiang (Winston) Chen is a postdoctoral associate at MIT CSAIL, working with Wojciech Matusik and Dina Katabi. He received his PhD from the University of Virginia, working with Professor John Stankovic. His research lies at the intersection of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), ubiquitous and mobile sensing, and human-computer interaction (HCI). In particular, his research specializes in developing Vibrational Interaction (VibInt) systems to perceive and infer information from human bodies, robots, and environments through vibrations. VibInt has been proposed to advance a wide variety of research areas, such as wearable interactions, robotics, smart health, smart homes, privacy and security. He has published his research in various top conferences and journals (e.g., Mobicom, Ubicomp, and Transactions on Mobile Computing), obtained five patents, and won the IEEE SECON 2018 Best Paper Award and the ACM SenSys 2020 Best Demo Award. Winston is also a co-founder of VibInt AI, a startup working on wearable devices using VibInt technologies, and his research IPs have been used in thousands of commodity devices.
Wenshou Wang is a research scientist in Prof. Matusik’s group, CSAIL, MIT. He got his Ph.D in Polymer Science in 2007 from Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Science. His current research interest is in the formulation of printable functional polymeric materials for 3D printing.
Wil Norton is a PhD student who joined the Computational Design and Fabrication Group in September 2022. He previously received a Bachelor’s degree in Electronics Engineering from the University of Regina.
Yagiz Aksoy is visiting our group as of February 2017. He is currently a PhD student at ETH Zurich, where he is working in the fields of low-level vision and interactive image editing while being advised by Marc Pollefeys.
Yichen Li joined our group in the spring of 2022. She received her Master’s degree from Stanford University, where she worked on 3D vision with Prof. Leo Guibas.
Yiyue Luo joined our group as a PhD student starting in the Fall of 2018. Prior to that, she obtained her Bachelor’s degree in Materials Science and Engineering from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Young Lee joined CDFG in the Fall 2022 as a PhD student in MIT EECS. He received his Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from Northwestern University, where he worked with Prof. John Rogers and Prof. Hyoyoung Jeong.
Yuanming Hu joined our group in September, 2017 after obtaining his bachelor’s in Computer Science from Yao class at Tsinghua University in 2017. His research interests include physics based simulation and rendering, and he is the author of Taichi, an open-source software with over 40 graphics papers implemented.
Ziwen Jiang joined the Computational Fabrication Group in June 2015 and is working on the Mechanical Engineering aspects of 3D printing as being researched in the group, amongst other topics.