Photo of smiling female Asian faculty member Dr. Ruike Renee Zhao, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University.
Bio-X Affiliated Faculty

Dr. Ruike Renee Zhao is an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University, where she directs the Soft Intelligent Materials Laboratory. Dr. Zhao received her BS degree from Xi'an Jiaotong University in 2012, and her MS and PhD degrees from Brown University in 2014 and 2016, respectively. She was a postdoc associate at MIT during 2016-2018 prior to her appointment as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at The Ohio State University from 2018 to 2021.

Dr. Zhao’s research concerns the development of stimuli-responsive soft composites for multifunctional robotic systems with integrated shape-changing, assembling, sensing, and navigation. By combining mechanics, polymer engineering, and advanced material manufacturing techniques, the functional soft composites enable applications in soft robotics, miniaturized biomedical devices, flexible electronics, deployable and morphing structures.

Dr. Zhao is a recipient of the ASME Journal of Applied Mechanics award (2021), the NSF Career Award (2020), and the ASME Haythornthwaite Research Initiation Award (2018).