Dr. Andrew Petruska has accepted an offer to join the faculty of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Colorado School of Mines. Congratulations Andrew! He and his wife are very excited to start their new life in Colorado.
Andrew earned a B.S. in Physics, a B.S./M.S. in Mechanical Engineering (ME) from Carnegie Mellon University, and his Ph.D. in ME (Robotics track) in 2014 under the supervision of Prof. Jake Abbott. Before starting his Ph.D. work, he spent four years in the defense industry working on ordnance and control systems for solid rocket motors. At the University of Utah he was a recipient of an NSF IGERT Traineeship, and conducted graduate research in the Telerobotics Lab, where his research involved magnetic manipulation using controllable dipole sources.
During his time at Utah, he won the 2014 IEEE Haptics Symposium Best Paper Award, where his paper was entitled, “Factors Affecting the Design of Untethered Magnetic Haptic Interfaces” (paper co-authored with J. B. Brink, D. E. Johnson and J. J. Abbott).
After completing his Ph.D. in spring of 2014, he joined Brad Nelson’s group (Multi-Scale Robotics Lab) at ETH Zurich as a postdoctoral researcher in the summer of 2014.