Throughout her career, roboticist Barbara Mazzolai has turned to nature for inspiration. Now she wants to ensure the technology she builds gives back to the environment, too.
After starting her career as a biologist, a chance opportunity saw Mazzolai switch streams to engineering and become an early pioneer of bioinspired robotics. Building on her knowledge of biology’s ability to solve a diverse set of problems, she has developed robots based on octopuses, plant roots, and even seeds. “I’ve always been fascinated by living organisms, [and] by the extraordinary variety of solutions in nature, selected by the evolutionary process,” she says.
Barbara Mazzolai
Employer:
Italian Institute of Technology
Occupation:
Associate director for robotics; director of the Bioinspired Soft Robotics Laboratory
Education:
Master’s degree in biology, University of Pisa; master’s degree in eco-management and audit schemes, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna; Ph.D. in microsystems engineering, University of Rome Tor Vergata
But Mazzolai, now the associate director for robotics at the Italian Institute of Technology, in Genoa, also believes engineering needs to reckon with its own impact on the natural world. That’s why she is advocating for a new field of research she calls “sustainability robotics.”
In a manifesto published in Nature Machine Intelligence in July, she and her collaborators outline a vision for a new approach to designing robots that’s meant to improve the relationship between nature, humanity, and technology.
“We need to reduce the footprint of our technology,” she says. “It’s really about thinking in a different way to open new possibilities for robotics [and] for society.” In this new mode of thinking, Mazzolai considers sustainability a core component of the design.
A child of nature
Mazzolai traces her fascination with the living world back to her childhood growing up on Italy’s Tuscan coast, close to the port city Livorno. Her father was a public-health inspector and a professional mycologist, and the family spent a lot of time exploring forests and learning about the local fungi and plants.
After toying with the prospect of pursuing art, her other major passion, Mazzolai ultimately decided to enroll at the University of Pisa in 1987 to study biology. She was particularly drawn to marine biology, but shortly before graduating with a master’s degree in 1995, she secured a research position at the Italian National Research Council’s Institute of Biophysics studying the cycles of heavy metals like mercury through both living and nonliving parts of the environment.
This involved collecting and analyzing samples from water, soil, vegetables, and even humans to understand the impact these metals have on health and the environment. She balanced this work with studying environmental management at the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, in Pisa, graduating with a master’s…
Read full article: Barbara Mazzolai Is Cultivating Sustainability Robotics
The post “Barbara Mazzolai Is Cultivating Sustainability Robotics” by Edd Gent was published on 09/22/2026 by spectrum.ieee.org