Biography
Amira Abdel-Rahman is an assistant professor at Cornell University, with a joint appointment in the multicollege Department of Design Tech and the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, where she leads the Architected Matter Group.
Before joining Cornell, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Engineering Design and Computing Laboratory at ETH Zürich. She earned her Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Bits and Atoms, where she developed inverse-design workflows powered by physics-informed artificial intelligence for the design and fabrication of large-scale material-robot systems.
She holds a Master’s in Design Studies in Technology from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and a bachelor’s degree from the American University in Cairo. Her professional experience includes positions at NVIDIA on the Simulation Technology team and at Autodesk in the Generative Design group, where she contributed to research at the intersection of computational design, artificial intelligence, and simulation.
Research Interests
- Inverse Design
- Embodied Intelligence
- Material-Robot Systems
- Swarm Robotics
- Structural Robotics
- Metamaterials
- Computational Fabrication
- Programmable Matter
Select Publications
-
Abdel-Rahman, Amira, Christopher Cameron, Benjamin Jenett, Miana Smith, and Neil Gershenfeld. “Self-replicating hierarchical modular robotic swarms.” Nature Communications Engineering 1, No. 1 (2022): 35.
-
Jenett, Benjamin, Amira Abdel-Rahman, Kenneth Cheung, and Neil Gershenfeld. “Material–robot system for assembly of discrete cellular structures.” IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters 4, No. 4 (2019): 4019–4026.