Katherine J. Kuchenbecker directs the Haptic Intelligence Department at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart, Germany, and she is an Honorary Professor at the University of Stuttgart. She was previously a tenured Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics at the University of Pennsylvania, where she held the Class of 1940 Bicentennial Endowed Term Chair and a secondary appointment in Computer and Information Science. Kuchenbecker earned her Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University in 2006 and did postdoctoral research at the Johns Hopkins University. Her research centers on haptic interfaces, which enable a user to touch virtual and distant objects as though they were real and within reach, as well as haptic sensing systems, which allow robots to physically interact with objects and people.
Kuchenbecker delivered a TEDYouth talk on haptics in 2012, and she has received several honors including a 2009 NSF CAREER Award, the 2012 IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Academic Early Career Award, a 2014 Penn Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching, and elevation to IEEE Fellow in 2021. Her team has won various best paper and best demonstration awards, and she frequently gives keynote talks at conferences. She was co-chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Haptics from 2014 to 2017, and she co-chaired the IEEE Haptics Symposium in 2016 and 2018. She is Associate Editor-in-Chief for the 2023 IEEE World Haptics Conference, and she has served as Spokesperson for the International Max Planck Research School for Intelligent Systems (IMPRS-IS) since it was founded in 2017.