Research | Hanna Schlegel Engin

Sensorimotor Neural Engineering Lab

As a first-year Ph.D. student at University of California, Berkeley, I have begun researching in the SNEL with Dr. Preeya Khanna. I have already been awarded the UC Berkeley Hawthorne Fellowship for the Fall of 2024 and the Spring of 2025. This fellowship is awarded to graduate students engaging and excelling in interdisciplinary data science research. My responsibilities and contributions are still evolving as I onboard into the lab, so there will be frequent updates to this page. I am currently continuing my work with soft sensors and wearable devices, but changing direction to research resistive sensors as well as carbon nanotube technology applications within the soft robotics space.

Morphable Bio-robotics Lab

Throughout my time working in the MBL with Dr. Tommaso Ranzani I was awarded Boston University's Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program Funding in the Spring, Summer, and Fall semesters of 2023 as well as named a Clare Boothe Luce Scholar, a women in STEM research award title, in Summer 2023. At the MBL, I contributed to a variety of projects in sensing, soft-robotics, wearables, signal processing, and more:

A Magnetically-Controlled Soft Robotic Glove for Hand Rehabilitation
- Manufactured electropermanent magnets to implement in rehabilitation gloves.
- Published work can be found in the

Machine Learning Architectures for Situation Awareness with Distributed Sensing from Soft Capacitive Pressure Sensors
- Manufactured and improved capacitive sensors to increase sensitivity x10 for applications ranging from accessibility to sports, health science, surgery, automotive industry, etc.
- This research project was presented at the Boston University Undergraduate Research Symposium on October 20th, 2023 and at the Harvard University National Collegiate Research Conference on January 19-21st, 2024. Check out the poster here:

Enabling Data Driven Control of Soft Actuators using Onboard Sensing
- Debugged real-time feedback loop for inertial measurement unit and pressure readings.

A Soft Deployable Endovascular Balloon for Modulation of Aortic Occlusion in Non-Compressible Torso Hemorrhages
- Adapted capacitive sensor technology to the architecture of a soft surgical device.