Tuesday, 14 October 2025 at Noon | 490 Cory Hall
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Professor Ryan D. Sochol
Department of Mechanical Engineering | University of Maryland, College Park
Host: Dorian Liepmann, BSAC Co-Director
ABSTRACT
During former President Barack Obama’s 2013 State of the Union Address, he remarked on the potential for additive manufacturing—or colloquially, “three-dimensional (3D) printing”—“to revolutionize the way we make almost everything.” Despite this potential, progress has been impeded by broad challenges associated with 3D printing technologies at smaller length scales. Recent breakthroughs in 3D micro/nanoprinting, however, hold unique promise to overcome past barriers and enable new frontiers for fundamental and applied research. In this seminar, Prof. Ryan D. Sochol will discuss how his Bioinspired Advanced Manufacturing (BAM) Laboratory is leveraging “Two-Photon Direct Laser Writing”—an additive manufacturing technique with printing resolutions down to the 100 nanometer range—for emerging biomedical applications, including soft microrobotic surgical instruments for minimally invasive interventions.
BIO
Ryan D. Sochol currently serves as Interim Director of the Maryland Robotics Center and holds Associate Professor appointments in both Mechanical Engineering and the Institute for Systems Research within the A. James Clark School of Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park. Prof. Sochol received his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Northwestern University in 2006, and both his M.S. and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2009 and 2011, respectively, with Doctoral Minors in Bioengineering and Public Health. Following postdoctoral training at the University of Tokyo, the University of California, Berkeley, the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences & Technology, Harvard Medical School, and Brigham & Women’s Hospital, Prof. Sochol joined the faculty at the University of Maryland, College Park, in 2015. Prof. Sochol is a Fischell Institute Fellow within the Robert E. Fischell Institute for Biomedical Devices also holds an affiliate appointment in the Fischell Department of Bioengineering. His group received IEEE MEMS Outstanding Student Paper Awards in 2019, 2021, and 2025, and the Microsystems & Nanoengineering/Springer Nature Outstanding Paper Award, the Micromachines – MDPI Outstanding Poster Award, and the Microfluidics on Glass Award in 2024. Prof. Sochol received the NSF CAREER Award in 2020, the Early Career Award from the IOP Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering in 2021, and the E. Robert Kent Outstanding Teaching Award for Junior Faculty in 2025, and was honored as an inaugural Rising Star by the journal, Advanced Materials Technologies, in 2023, and as an American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) Rising Star in 2024.
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