In this episode, we interviewed Carmel Majidi, who is an Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Carmel's mission is to discover materials, hardware architectures, and fabrication methods that allow robots and machines to behave like soft biological organisms and be safe for contact with humans. The aim is to replace the bulky and rigid hardware in existing robots with soft, lightweight, and deformable technologies that match the functionality of natural biological tissue. Currently, his group is focused on filled-elastomer composites and soft microfluidic systems that exhibit unique combinations of mechanical, electrical, and thermal properties and can function as “artificial” skin, nervous tissue, and muscle for soft robotics and wearables. I’m particularly interested in approaches that are practical from a rapid prototyping and robotics implementation perspective. This includes efforts to enable robust mechanical and electrical interfacing between soft-matter systems and conventional microelectronics and hardware.