Aude Bolopion receives the 2022 “Big-in-Small award”

This yearly award, from the microrobotics international community in the MARSS conference in Toronto, promotes “the best microrobotician” of the year at the international level.

Currently CNRS researcher in FEMTO-ST in France since 2011, Aude Bolopion obtained her Phd in Sorbonne university Paris in the Stéphane Regnier group in 2010. Her research activity is focused on the design and the control of micromanipulation systems using force fields induced by remote sources (such as magnetophoretic effects, dielectrophoresis or thermally-capillary actuation). She proposes, for example, high speed control methods combining both dielectrophoresis based microrobots and impedance spectroscopy position measurement, or, highly original microrobot walking on water! recently published in the prestigious journal Science Robotics.

She explores a large spectrum in term of science, activities going from fundamental contributions close to applied mathematics in modelling dielectrophoresis to applied collaborations with the French blood agency and companies in innovative therapies. During the last years, Aude develops a lot of collaborations with international experts: in surface tension (Prof. Lambert in Brussels), in microfluidics (Prof. Renaud, EPFL Switzerland), in dielectrophoresis (Prof. Hurak in Check republic), and also Belgium physicists or French chemists. Several leaders in microrobotics have got also the pleasure to work with her: such as Stephane Régnier in Paris and Metin and Sergej Groups in Germany.

Aude is also very active in the community participating in several conference and journal committees. She becomes recently co-chair of the IEEE TC on Micro/Nano Robotics and Automation. In FEMTO-ST, she is now the leader of the group “Robotics, Manipulation and instrumentation in micro-nanoscales”: 36 people, including prof., ass prof. post-docs and Phd students. Based on these works and these leadership demonstrations, she obtains recently the highly selective CNRS Bronze medal.

Last but not least, Aude invests a lot in improving relationship between science and society. She makes, every year, several talks and videos promoting robotics and sciences for a large audience and also promoting engineering science to young girls. The link with society deals also with the potential applications of microrobotics: Aude works in closed collaboration with biologists to push micro-nanorobotics in a global worldwide trend of Innovative therapies where lymphocytes will replace progressively the chemical drugs.

Contact : Aude Bolopion