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About

Rebecca K. Kramer is a pioneering roboticist whose work sits at the intersection of soft robotics, materials science, and wearable technology. Her research has fundamentally advanced how engineers design, sense, and manufacture soft robotic systems — machines built from compliant, flexible materials capable of safely interacting with humans and unpredictable environments. Kramer's most influential contributions include rigorous mechanical characterization of elastomers critical to soft robotics (221 citations), giving the field a stronger quantitative foundation. She has been instrumental in developing embedded sensing technologies, including liquid-metal curvature sensors for joint proprioception (173 citations) and scalable capacitive strain sensors (96 citations), enabling robots to perceive their own deformation with unprecedented fidelity. Her work on monolithic integration of sensing and actuation (115 citations) demonstrated that soft robots need not treat these functions as afterthoughts — a philosophy that has reshaped design thinking across the community. Beyond traditional robotics, Kramer has explored robotic fabrics with variable-stiffness fibers and conformable actuation (114 citations), pointing toward a future of truly wearable robotic systems. Her review on self-healing soft robots (112 citations) has become an essential reference for researchers designing resilient systems. Collectively, her work has garnered nearly 1,100 citations, establishing her as a defining voice in the rapidly growing field of soft and embodied robotics.