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About

ChangHee Son is a researcher specializing in smart materials, bio-inspired adhesion, and soft robotics, with a particular focus on shape memory polymers (SMPs) and their transformative applications in advanced gripping and manipulation technologies. His most significant contributions center on harnessing the unique reversible adhesive properties of SMPs to develop switchable dry adhesion systems — a field with profound implications for robotic manipulation, medical adhesives, and microassembly. Son's landmark work on tunable SMP dry adhesive grippers (2023, 30 citations) demonstrated how stiffness control could precisely modulate adhesion, opening new avenues beyond traditional smart adhesive research. Building on this foundation, his 2025 study on multiscale switchable dry adhesion using nanotip-structured SMP surfaces (19 citations) advanced the field's understanding of how controllable surface roughness enables sophisticated adhesion switching. His earlier 2020 pick-and-place gripper work (6 citations) laid important groundwork for these developments. More recently, Son has expanded his research into microelectromechanical systems, evidenced by his work on ultra-thin silicon electrothermal actuators. Collectively, his publications reveal a researcher steadily building a cohesive body of work bridging materials science, surface engineering, and robotics — making meaningful contributions to the next generation of intelligent gripping systems.