Metin Sitti

Metin Sitti is the President of Koç University in Istanbul, Turkey, and holds academic roles as a Professor at ETH Zurich's Institute for Biomedical Engineering and an honorary professor at the University of Stuttgart. He previously directed the Physical Intelligence Department at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (MPI-IS) and held professorships at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of California, Berkeley. His work focuses on bio-inspired robotics, soft robotics, and physical intelligence, with over 500 peer-reviewed publications and 44,900 citations (h-index: 115).

Education: BSc (1992) and MSc (1994) in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Boğaziçi University, Turkey; PhD (1999) in Electrical Engineering from the University of Tokyo, Japan.

Research interests include wireless medical robots, gecko-inspired adhesives, and biohybrid systems. His lab has pioneered technologies like Setex® adhesives and microscale medical implants, with applications in drug delivery and surgical tools. Over 70 PhD students and 70 postdocs have graduated under his mentorship, many becoming faculty or industry leaders.

Awards include IEEE Fellow, ERC Advanced Grant (2019), and Rahmi Koç Medal of Science (2018). He founded Setex Technologies (2012) and leads collaborations with institutions like Cyber Valley and the Max Planck ETH Center for Learning Systems.