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)

Peter Connor

Emily McCabe

John Peters

Daniel Esser

Jesse d'Almeida

NSF Graduate Fellow

Abby Grillo

Piper Cannon

Jason Shrand

Tayfun Efe Ertop

Undergraduate Students

Mariana Smith

Kelsey Corwen

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

Max Emerson

PhD Student

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

James M Ferguson

PhD Student

Philip Swaney

PhD Student

Tech Transfer Officer, Vanderbilt

Hunter Gilbert

PhD Student

Assistant Prof., LSU

Katy Riojas

PhD Student

Margaret Rox

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

09/08/2022

Congratulations to our undergraduate researcher Mariana in being awarded an Excellence in Research Poster Award in the category of Engineering for her presentation at the Vanderbilt Undergraduate Research Fair on September 8! She was selected as the only awardee in the discipline of engineering, and received a $200 prize.

08/25/2022

Congrats to Shannon, a summer undergrad fellow working in the lab, for presenting her research at the VISE Seminar!

08/23/2022

James successfuly defended his PhD thesis titled "Estimation in Minimally Invasive Surgical Robotics: Enabling Novel Technologies in Image Guidance and Sensing". Congratulations Dr. Ferguson!

08/15/2022

Peter Connor joined MEDLab this fall. He is pursuing a PhD in mechancial engineering. We're glad to have you here, and can't wait to see what you accomplish!

08/04/2022

Undergraduate researcher Mariana Smith presented her research on a Foldable Laparoscopic Omnidirectional Wrist for Effective Robotic Surgery (FLOWERS) at the SyBBURE Symposium in August.

07/07/2022

Max successfully defended his thesis entitled "Estimation, Modeling and Control of Steerable Needles for Transendoscopic Deployment into the Lung". Congratulations Dr. Emerson!

06/25/2022

The MED Lab and the Startup Companies that have spun out if it made 7 presentations, and published 5 papers, at the 2022 Hamlyn Symposium Hamlyn Symposium on Medical Robotics. Congratulations to Margaret Rox, Daniel Esser, and Jesse d'Almeida who traveled to London, UK, to present their work! Dr. Webster also gave the keynote talk at the Autonomy and Shared Autonomy Workshop, as well as a presentation entitled "How I learned to stop worrying and love the MRI" at the Image-Guided and Collaborative Medical Robotics workshop.

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).

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!