MEDLab

Lab Director

Robert J Webster III

Affiliated Faculty

Erin Gillaspie

Paul Russell

Robert F. Labadie

Fabien Maldonado

S. Duke Herrell

Jason Mitchell

Thomas J Withrow

Graduate Students (PhD)

Emily McCabe

John Peters

Daniel Esser

Jesse d'Almeida

NSF Graduate Fellow

Abby Grillo

Piper Cannon

Jason Shrand

Max Emerson

Tayfun Efe Ertop

James M Ferguson

Margaret Rox

Undergraduate Students

Shannon Alptekin

PhD/Postdoc Alumni

Andria Remirez

PhD Student

Patrick Wellborn

PhD Student

Joshua Gafford

Postdoc

EndoTheia

Trevor Bruns

PhD Student

Virtuoso Surgical

Ernar Amanov

Postdoc

Josephine Granna

Postdoc

E. Bryn Pitt

PhD Student

Alan Kuntz

Postdoc

Assistant Prof., Univ. Utah

Yue Chen

Co-Advised PhD Student

Assistant Prof., UARK

Smita De

Postdoc

Cleveland Clinic

Loris Fichera

Postdoc

Assistant Prof., WPI

Isuru Godage

Postdoc

Assistant Prof., DePaul

Richard Hendrick

PhD Student

Virtuoso Surgical

Neal Dillon

PhD Student

Virtuoso Surgical

Art Mahoney

Postdoc

Sarcos Robotics

Philip Swaney

PhD Student

Tech Transfer Officer, Vanderbilt

Hunter Gilbert

PhD Student

Assistant Prof., LSU

Katy Riojas

PhD Student

Patrick Anderson

PhD Student

David Comber

Co-Advised PhD Student

Sarcos Robotics

Lou Kratchman

PhD Student

Draper Labs

Raul Wirz

Postdoc

Software Engr., Globus Med.

Ray Lathrop

PhD Student

Eli Lilly

Jenna Gorlewicz

PhD Student

Assistant Prof., SLU

Jessica Burgner

Postdoc

Faculty, MZH Hannover

Caleb Rucker

PhD Student

Assistant Prof., UT Knoxville

Jadav Das

Co-Advised PhD Student

Rockwell Automation, Inc.

Michael Siebold

PhD Student

Undergraduate Alumni

Jacob Rogatinsky

Mustafa Ugur

Emily Tran

Jacob Gloudemans

Narendran Narasimhan

Mia McConnell

Adrian Alepuz

Jasmine Jiang

Anthony Frederick

Nick Pieper

Katie Gosbee

Juyoung Kim

Adrian Florea

James Zhu

Evan Blum

Nick Catalan

Patrick Hall

Cindy Lin Liu

Matthew Medlock

Mark Chambliss

Brandon Bolds

Todd Dutton

Rob Pieper

Sam Nackman

Tiffany Cheng

Jim Boyle

Randy Smith

Xavier Waller

David Gostin

Tyler Steier

Justin Saunders

Zach Smith

Mohammed (Mish) Rahman

Stephen (Sam) Malanowski

Jordan Croom

Amri Abdul Razak

Michael Jekot

Marlena Clark

Syed Hamid

Sani Sulaiman

Scott Nill

Dexter Watkins

Dylan P Losey

Peter York

Yifan Zhu

Erik Lamers

Matthew Hostetler

Recent News

06/02/2022

Three papers from MED lab were accepted to the Hamlyn Symposium on Medical Robotics, in addition to papers from EndoTheia and Virtuoso Surgical. Congratulations to Margaret Rox, Daniel Esser, and Jesse d'Almeida who will be traveling to London, UK, to present their work!

05/21/2022

The annual lab crawfish boil was a steaming success, with many of our students, collaborators, and friends attending. Our own PhD candidate James cooked up a whooping 90lbs of crawfish for everyone to enjoy!

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04/13/2022

Our graduate student Tayfun Efe Ertop gave a workshop talk about “Continuum Robots for Lung Applications: Past Experiences and Future” in the “Surgical Robots: The Next Generation” session at the ISMR Conference (Atlanta, GA).

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04/04/2022

MED Lab is proud to announce that graduate student Jesse F. d'Almeida and undergrad student Adrian Florea both received the prestigious and extremely competitive Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation. The fellowship award will fully fund them during their time in a PhD program for the upcoming years! Congratulations to both of them!

04/01/2022

Piper Cannon, one of our first-year students, presented a novel tool for auricle retraction at the Design of Medical Devices conference this year. The conference was hosted by the University of Michigan and this work was presented during a session regarding the advancements in surgical tools.

02/22/2022

Adrian Florea, one of the undergraduate researchers working in our lab, presented his paper “Design of a Modular, Multi-Arm Concentric Tube Robot Featuring Roller Gears” at the SPIE Medical Imaging 2022 Conference at San Diego, CA.

01/31/2022

Our paper titled "Towards Suturing From Within the Urethra Using Concentric Tube Robots: First Experiences in Biological Tissues” has been accepted to ISMR 2022. Our graduate student Tayfun Efe Ertop will be presenting our work at the conference in Atlanta on April.

01/21/2022

Some of our students (Jason, Emily, Abby, Jesse, Jack, Daniel, and Piper) led a “Winterim” course during winter break at local all-girls high school, Harpeth Hall. The course, titled ‘STAR (Structures, Technology and Robotics): A Hands-On Engineering Experience,’ focused on many different aspects of engineering. The girls used the fundamentals they learned in class to build their own remote-controlled robots and compete in a final tournament! Good job to both the students and the instructors!

HarpBot, a drawing robot used to teach concepts of robotics, plays hangman with the students
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12/01/2021

Our lab has been awarded with a VISE Seed Grant for our “Diagnosing Pleural Effusions Using a Self-Assembling Needle Robot” project. One of our graduate students, Tayfun Efe Ertop, will be working on this project to do research on our Reconfigurable Parallel Continuum Robot concept, and novel continuum robot sensing methods.

08/03/2021

Piper Cannon, Jesse d'Almeida, Daniel Esser, Abby Grillo, Emily McCabe, and Jack Peters joined the MED Lab this summer. They are all pursuing a PhD in Mechanical Engineering. We are looking forward to their contributions to the lab!

Lab Director

Affiliated Faculty

Graduate Students (PhD)

Undergraduate Students

PhD/Postdoc Alumni

Undergraduate Alumni

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