Prof. 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 and 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, the Microsystems & Nanoengineering/Springer Nature Outstanding Paper Award, the Micromachines – MDPI Outstanding Poster Award, and the Microfluidics on Glass Award in 2024, and the Springer Nature Best Oral Presentation Award – Runner-Up in 2022 and 2025. 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 of Mechanical Engineering in 2024.