Short biography

Wojciech Matusik is the Cadence Design Systems Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, where he leads the Computational Design and Fabrication Group at CSAIL. His group builds AI systems that design and physically produce materials, devices, and robots, together with the fabrication hardware that makes them.

Wojciech Matusik is the Cadence Design Systems Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, where he leads the Computational Design and Fabrication Group at CSAIL and holds a joint appointment in Mechanical Engineering. His group builds AI systems that design and physically produce materials, devices, and robots, spanning computational design, physics simulation, materials and molecular discovery, and the fabrication hardware itself.

He received his Ph.D. from MIT in 2003, an S.M. from MIT in 2001, and a B.S. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1997, and worked at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, Adobe Systems, and Disney Research Zurich before returning to MIT. His honors include a Sloan Research Fellowship, a DARPA Young Faculty Award, the ACM SIGGRAPH Significant New Researcher Award, and a Humboldt Research Award.

Wojciech Matusik is the Cadence Design Systems Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, where he leads the Computational Design and Fabrication Group at CSAIL and holds a joint appointment in Mechanical Engineering. His group asks what AI needs in order to design real things, and then builds it: representations of materials, structures, mechanisms and robots that a model can synthesize and a solver can verify, simulators that run from a design to its performance and back again, discovery systems that propose new materials and molecules and test them on real instruments, and the machines that make the results physical.

The approach goes back to his doctoral work. His 2003 thesis built a data-driven generative model of material reflectance, two decades before generative models moved to the center of AI, and fabrication entered the work in 2009. Carrying one method across optics, textiles, chemistry and molecular design is, on his account, what shows whether the method holds and where it breaks.

He received his Ph.D. from MIT in 2003, an S.M. from MIT in 2001, and a B.S. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1997, and worked at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, Adobe Systems, and Disney Research Zurich before returning to MIT. His honors include a Sloan Research Fellowship, a DARPA Young Faculty Award, the ACM SIGGRAPH Significant New Researcher Award, a Humboldt Research Award, and MIT's Ruth and Joel Spira Award for Excellence in Teaching.