[1] She is an American researcher focussing on haptic technology and robot-assisted surgery, and a former high school and college volleyball player.
Kuchenbecker became a Director at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in 2017 [1], where she leads an interdisciplinary team that invents haptic interfaces for touching virtual and remote environments, studies human haptic interaction, and endows autonomous robots with an astute sense of touch.
Her dissertation, Characterizing and Controlling the High-Frequency Dynamics of Haptic Interfaces, was supervised by Günter Niemeyer.
She was tenured as an Associate Professor in 2013, and named to the Class of 1940 Bicentennial Endowed Term Chair in 2015.
[4] Kuchenbecker was named an IEEE Fellow in 2022, "for contributions to interactive haptic systems and robotic touch perception".