Washington State Names IIT Kharagpur Alumnus Narasimha Boddeti a Dean's Faculty Fellow for Work on Soft Robotics and Architected Materials

Washington State University has named Narasimha Boddeti, an assistant professor in the School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering, a Dean's Faculty Fellow in the university's Voiland College of Engineering and Architecture — a recognition that comes with multi-year funding intended to expand his research programme and create new opportunities for the students working alongside him. Boddeti, who holds the title of Berry Family Assistant Professor, is a 2006 mechanical engineering graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, and earned his doctorate at the University of Colorado Boulder in 2014.

The Dean's Faculty Fellow programme, established in 2025 through donor gifts to the Voiland College, is designed to honour faculty members whose academic performance and research most directly advance the college's broader institutional goals. Recipients receive sustained funding across multiple years rather than a one-time award, a structure intended to give selected researchers the runway to pursue more ambitious, longer-horizon projects than typical single-year grants allow, while also expanding hands-on research opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students in their labs.

Boddeti's research sits at the intersection of computational mechanics, additive manufacturing, soft robotics, architected materials and composites — a combination that allows his lab to move fluidly between designing materials on a computer and physically 3D-printing them to test whether their real-world mechanical properties match what the models predicted. His team's central methodological approach blends computational modelling with 3D-printing strategies to engineer materials with tailored properties, an approach that has produced results ranging from soft robotic grippers designed for automated apple harvesting to novel composite structures used in stingray-inspired soft robots capable of precisely tunable swimming kinematics.

Much of Boddeti's most distinctive work centres on what materials scientists call architected materials — structures engineered with deliberate internal geometry, rather than relying purely on the intrinsic properties of a given substance, to achieve mechanical behaviour not found in nature. In 2024, that line of research earned him a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development, or CAREER, award worth approximately $600,000, one of the most prestigious grants available to early-career American academics, which he is using to develop a novel 3D-printing process for soft architected materials that hold liquid within a soft solid — mimicking, in engineering terms, the way skin or other biological tissue retains water within a flexible structure. Such materials could eventually find application in realistic organ models for medical training, energy-absorbing structures, and flexible actuators or sensors for robotics.

Before pursuing his doctorate, Boddeti spent time in industry, working as a software engineer at Think3 Design Solutions in India and in product lifecycle management and computer-aided design at Tata Technologies, giving him direct commercial software and manufacturing experience that predates his academic career. He subsequently completed a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Digital Manufacturing and Design Centre at the Singapore University of Technology and Design between 2016 and 2019, before joining Washington State University's mechanical and materials engineering faculty as an assistant professor in January 2020.

His research applications extend well beyond the laboratory bench. Beyond soft robotics and architected materials, Boddeti's broader portfolio touches design and sustainability, aerospace-relevant composites, and infrastructure applications, reflecting a research philosophy oriented toward materials and structures that outperform conventional designs across multiple engineering domains rather than optimising narrowly for a single application. His publication record, which spans more than two thousand citations according to Google Scholar tracking, reflects sustained output across topology optimisation, mechanics, membranes and adhesion research over the course of his career.

For Washington State University's Voiland College, the fellowship represents an investment in a faculty member whose work sits precisely at the convergence of computational design, advanced manufacturing and next-generation robotics — three research areas increasingly central to how American engineering schools position themselves competitively for federal research funding, industry partnerships and student recruitment. For Boddeti personally, the fellowship provides the kind of sustained, multi-year backing that allows a research programme to pursue genuinely ambitious questions rather than chasing the funding cycle from one single-year grant to the next.

The recognition adds to a growing list of honours for Boddeti's programme at WSU, following his 2024 NSF CAREER award, and reflects the broader trajectory of an academic career that has moved steadily from undergraduate engineering training at IIT Kharagpur, through industry software roles in India, to a doctorate and postdoctoral research abroad, and finally to a faculty position where his work now sits among the university's most closely watched research programmes in advanced materials and robotics.