July 27, 2023
By Ashley Ritchie

Gregory S. Sawicki, associate professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, has been appointed Joseph Anderer Faculty Fellow in recognition of his outstanding research accomplishments, emerging leadership in his field, and the contributions he has made to Georgia Tech and the Woodruff School.

Sawicki, who will hold the position from July 1, 2023, to June 30, 2028, will receive discretionary funds that amount to $12,000 a year, meant for him to continue to grow his research and educational programs.

Sawicki directs the Physiology of Wearable Robotics (PoWeR) Laboratory at Georgia Tech. The research group’s goal is to combine tools from engineering, physiology, and neuroscience to discover neuromechanical principles underpinning optimal locomotion performance and apply them to develop lower-limb robotic devices capable of improving both healthy and impaired human locomotion for elite athletes, aging baby boomers, and post-stroke community ambulators, to name a few.

By focusing on the human side of the human-machine interface, Sawicki and his group have begun to create a roadmap for the design of lower-limb robotic exoskeletons that are truly symbiotic – that is, wearable devices that work seamlessly in concert with the underlying physiological systems to facilitate the emergence of augmented human locomotion performance.

Sawicki joined Georgia Tech in August 2017 and holds appointments in the Woodruff School and the School of Biological Sciences. Prior, he spent eight years as a faculty member in the Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering at NC State and UNC–Chapel Hill. Sawicki received a B.S. from Cornell University in 1999 and an M.S. in mechanical engineering from the University of California-Davis in 2001. He completed his Ph.D. in human neuromechanics at the University of Michigan, Ann-Arbor in 2007 and was an NIH-funded post-doctoral fellow in integrative biology at Brown University from 2007-2009.

The process of choosing the Joseph Anderer Faculty Fellow was based on initial data provided by Sawicki, which reflected his publications, sponsored expenditures, and graduate student advising.