Interested in working in/with the Culpepper lab? Please read this before emailing Prof. Culpepper.

Research - The Science and Practical Application of Machine and Instrument Design

There comes a point in all hardware technology where the state-of-the-art can’t handle emerging applications. Forward motion requires creativity and invention to generate fundamentally new ideas. These ideas must be rapidly made practical and useful via a rigorous combination of advanced machine design science, applied engineering research, manufacturing practice and financial considerations, and application. That is what we enable.

People come to us when you can’t buy it, and nobody knows how to “build and make it work.” Then we:
(1) Invent, design and fabricate high-performance machine systems;
(2) Generate design theory/tools/methods that enable deployment the preceding; and
(3) Train scientists/engineers to make and use them via collaboration and professional classes

We are creative, hard core, hands-on people that meld advanced engineering and basic science to produce new concepts which change the paradigm for specific machine technologies, thereby enabling rapid advances. We develop understanding of the fundamental issues that dominate/limit these technologies, then create the practical knowledge/tools/theory/proof that engineers need to rapidly design/employ them at scale and acceptable cost. We apply this work to advanced machine technologies that:

  • Make (e.g. manufacturing, machine tools, rapid prototyping, fixturing, etc…)

  • Move (e.g. robotics, actuators, precision motion stages, multi-axis mechanisms, etc…)

  • Measure (e.g. sensors, instrumentation, microscopy, medical devices, telescopes, etc…)

Education - Theory Meets Hands-on

Hands-on fabrication/testing are key to the work in our lab. Prof. Culpepper teaches advanced design and manufacturing classes wherein theory and applied methods are integrated to produce engineers that truly live MIT’s motto… Mens et Manus - Mind and Hand. If you take his classes, you will learn to use judiciously use rigorous modeling and experiments to design machines… and then you will get your hands dirty learning to deliver hardware that works, that is under budget, and that is ahead of schedule.

I am at MIT because I love enabling people to become better designers/scientists/engineers and I enjoy working with them to create new technologies.

Professor Martin L. Culpepper
Ralph E. and Eloise F. Cross Professor in Manufacturing
Class of 1960 Fellow