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About

Nadine Besse is a leading researcher in soft robotics and flexible electronics, whose work has fundamentally advanced the integration of high-voltage thin-film transistors (HVTFTs) with soft actuators. Her major contributions center on creating large-scale, individually addressable actuator arrays for haptic feedback and active skins. In her landmark 2017 paper, she demonstrated a flexible active skin comprising a 32×24 matrix of shape memory polymer (SMP) actuators—768 individually controllable tactile pixels—enabling unprecedented reconfigurability in a wearable, 55-gram sleeve. This work, cited over 130 times, showcases her ability to merge materials science with system-level design. Equally impactful is her development of flexible zinc-tin oxide HVTFTs operating above 1 kV, which she integrated with dielectric elastomer actuators (DEAs) to create a 16-actuator array. This breakthrough, cited more than 118 times, solved a critical bottleneck in soft robotics: the need for high-voltage, flexible switching to drive large-strain actuators. Besse’s work is foundational for next-generation haptic interfaces, soft grippers, and wearable robotics, demonstrating how thin-film transistor technology can be harnessed for complex, high-performance soft systems.