Laura Blumenschein is an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University. She received her PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford in 2019 under the supervision of Professor Allison Okamura. Her research focuses on creating more robust and adaptable soft robots including soft robots inspired by plants, which grow in order to explore their environments and build structures, and soft haptic devices which allow for more seamless human-robot interaction. Laura is an NSF graduate research fellow and her work on plant-inspired growing robots has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Popular Science, Wired, and on CBS’s Innovation Nation.