Ann Sychterz

Ann Sychterz (SICK-tesh) is an assistant professor in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. With her team at SMARTI lab, they harness geometrically nonlinear systems, such as tensegrity structures and origami, for adaptive civil infrastructure. She obtained her PhD in 2018 from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) addressing the novel use of control algorithms, statistical diagnostic tools, and real-time feedback on a full-scale tensegrity structure to enable smooth deployability, damage detection, adaptation, and learning. She completed her masters and bachelors of science at the University of Waterloo, Canada. Dr. Sychterz completed a postdoctoral position at the University of Michigan on actuator optimization of adaptive origami structures. She has funded projects by the National Science Foundation, the Illinois Department of Transportation, and the Swiss National Science Foundation.