Ellen Rumley

Ellen Rumley is a postdoc developing electrohydraulically-driven artificial muscles in the Robotic Materials Department. In 2024 Ellen received her Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Colorado Boulder. As an NSF Graduate Research fellow, she has developed fully biodegradable artificial muscles, and has designed modules for driving reconfigurable high-speed robots. Her current work (in preparation for submission) investigates humidity-dependent charge migration effects through the composite dielectric systems making up electrohydraulic artificial muscles.

Ellen has been involved in student representation roles to advocate the prioritization of doctoral working conditions, and was elected as the MPI-IS PhD student representative for 2023 and 2024, as well as overall CPT section representative for the Max Planck PhDnet in 2024.

Ellen is currently organizing two grassroots initiatives. One (a collaboration with PhD students from MPI-FKF) is the Max Planck Science Policy Winter School - a week long program helping early-career scientists across the MPG to navigate science policy as a future career option. This event will take place at the Harnack Haus in Berlin in January 2026 (https://www.fkf.mpg.de/mpsps). Ellen's second initiative, Catalyst, (in collaboration with PhD students from the Uni. Teubingen) aims to develop a open-source gamified app for connecting scientists across different academic institutes and research disciplines (https://catalyst-app.org/?p=221).

In January 2026, Ellen will begin a postdoc role as an international robotics policy analyst through the IEEE RAS Science and Technology Watch Board, under the supervision of Prof. Allison Okamura at Stanford University.