Professor Yao Receives Stony Brook Foundation Trustee Award
To encourage and support promising early career faculty, the University, through the
Provost’s Office, provides research, scholarship and art-making funding opportunities.
Five Stony Brook Foundation Trustees Faculty Awards of $20,000 each are competitively
available to early career faculty. The awards recognize early-career faculty whose
research, creative activities and scholarly achievements predict an exceptional trajectory.
Assistant Professor Shanshan Yao is a recipient of this award for her project, “Restoring Tactile Sensation and Feedback in Robot-Assisted Surgery." The goal of this project is to restore the underutilized haptic sensation during robotic-assisted minimally invasive surgery by instrumenting multi-DOF tactile sensors on the robot/patient side and multimodal haptic feedback interfaces on the surgeon side. The tactile sensors mounted to surgical tools will gather multi-DOF force and torque during the tool-tissue or tool-tool contact. The multimodal haptic actuators attached to the surgeon’s skin will enable the transmission of the sensed tactile information to the surgeon in real-time. The system is expected to improve operation accuracy, decrease operation duration, and enable more complicated surgical tasks without damaging tissues.
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