Hi! I am Purnendu.

It is pronounced as pour-nen-doo and means Full Moon in Sanskrit. I just go by a singular name. I am a designer, trained as a physicist. I combine my love for design, physics, and computation to create interactive machines rooted in material science.

I love to surround myself with great people, crazy ideas, and am always seeking creative environments. I recently graduated with a Ph.D. with interdisciplinary engineering focus in 'Creative Technology and Design' from the ATLAS Institute at University of Colorado Boulder . My dissertation demonstrated inventing and creating novel machines leveraging electrostatic manipulation of soft matter for shape changing materials, wearable haptic devices, and basics towards a motionless 3D printer. This work has spanned domains across wearable technologies, soft actuators and sensors, haptics for augmented and virtual reality as well as computational fabrication and additive manufacturing. I have worked with Carson Bruns , Greg Whiting , and Mark D. Gross and actively collaborated with Christoph Keplinger and Daniel Leithinger . During my Ph.D., I also had the opportunity to work at the Reality Labs (RL) Research at Meta building soft wearable haptic devices.

Earlier, I co-founded a nanotechnology company in India Log 9 Materials , (which focuses on manufacturing and developing commercial applications around Graphene) and a multidisciplinary Design Studio at IIT Roorkee. I hold a Integrated Master's degree in physics (with specialization in material science) from the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee. My portfolio includes research at various institutions around the globe including the Max Planck Institute for Informatics and Bauhaus University Weimar.

I love to build things, break more things, read , write , and sketch as well as travel (17 countries so far). Connect with me at: purnendu.connect@gmail.com

Some of the research papers, articles, dissertations that have had a lasting influence on me are listed here (for book recommendations, please scroll more):