Amira Abdel-Rahman

MIT Center for Bits and Atoms

I recently finished my PhD at MIT Center for Bits and Atoms.

I'm an incoming assistant professor at Cornell University. I will begin a joint appointment in the multicollege department of Design Tech and Cornell Engineering’s Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (MAE) in Fall 2026, leading the Architected Matter Group.

My research is at the intersection of computational fabrication and computer graphics. I create inverse design workflows to design and build discrete metamaterial (Digital Material) and reconfigurable robotic swarms. I develop scalable integrated tools to design, simulate, optimize, fabricate and control these systems.

Portfolio

• Cornell Architected Matter Group
• Personal Portfolio
• Rapid-Prototyping of Rapid-Prototyping Machines
• How to Make (Almost) Anything

Publications

• - Miana Smith, Jack Forman, Amira Abdel-Rahman, and Neil Gershenfeld. "Voxel Invention Kit: Reconfigurable building blocks for prototyping interactive electronic structures". CHI 2025. Accepted.
• - Miana Smith, Amira Abdel-Rahman, and Neil Gershenfeld. "Self-Reconfigurable Robots for Collaborative Discrete Lattice Assembly". ICRA 2024. Link.
• - Faraz Faruqi, Ahmed Katary, Tarik Hasic, Amira Abdel-Rahman, Nayeemur Rahman, Leandra Tejedor, Mackenzie Leake, Megan Hofmann and Stefanie Mueller. "Style2Fab: Functionality-Aware Segmentation for Fabricating Personalized 3D Models with Generative AI". UIST 2023. (pp. 1-13). Link.
• - Alfonso Parra Rubio, Dixia Fan, Benjamin Jenett, José del Águila Ferrandis,Filippos Tourlomousis, Amira Abdel-Rahman, David Preiss, Michael Triantafyllou and Neil Gershenfeld. "Modular Morphing Lattices for Large Scale Underwater Continuum Robotic Structures" Soft Robotics Journal, 2023. Link.
• - Amira Abdel-Rahman, Christopher Cameron, Benjamin Jenett, Miana Smith, and Neil Gershenfeld, "Self-Replicating Hierarchical Modular Robotic Swarms" In Nature Communications Engineering, 2022. Link.
• - Zach Fredin, Jiri Zemanek, Camron Blackburn, Erik Strand, Amira Abdel-Rahman, Premila Rowles, and Neil Gershenfeld, "Discrete Integrated Circuit Electronics (DICE)" In IEEE High Performance Extreme Computing Conference, 2020. Link.
• - Amira Abdel-Rahman, Aaron T. Becker, Daniel E. Biediger, Kenneth C. Cheung, Sándor P. Fekete, Neil A. Gershenfeld, Sabrina Hugo et al. "Space ants: constructing and reconfiguring large-scale structures with finite automata." In Symposium on Computational Geometry (SoCG), p. 73. 2020. Link.
• - Eike Niehs, Arne Schmidt, Christian Scheffer, Daniel E. Biediger, Michael Yannuzzi, Benjamin Jenett, Amira Abdel-Rahman, Kenneth C. Cheung, Aaron T. Becker, and Sándor P. Fekete. "Recognition and reconfiguration of lattice-based cellular structures by simple robots." In IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). 2020. Link.
• - Benjamin Jenett, Amira Abdel-Rahman, Kenneth Cheung, and Neil Gershenfeld. "Material-robot system for assembly of discrete cellular structures". In Robotics and Automation Letters. IEEE, 2019. Link.
• - Amira Abdel-Rahman, Marcin Kosicki, Panagiotis Michalatos, and Martha Tsigkari. "Design of thermally deformable laminates using machine learning". In SEMC (Structural Engineering, Mechanics and Computation) 2019 . Elsevier, 2019. Link.
• - Allan Costa, Amira Abdel-Rahman, Benjamin Jenett, Neil Gershenfeld, Irina Kostitsyna, and Kenneth Cheung. "Algorithmic approaches to reconfigurable assembly systems". In 2019 IEEE Aerospace Conference, pages 1–8. IEEE, 2019. Link.
• - Sara Falcone, John Zhang, Agnes Cameron, and Amira Abdel-Rahman. "Blockchain Design for an Embedded System." Ledger 4, 2019. Link.
• - Amira Abdel-Rahman and Panagiotis Michalatos. Magnetic Morphing. In the 37th Annual Conference of the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA), pages 18–27, 2017. Link.
• - Amira Abdel-Rahman, "Shape Morphing : Swarm Magnetics". Master's thesis, Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 2017. Link.
• - Amira Abdel-Rahman and Elnaz Tafrihi. "Heat-actuated auxetic facades". In Facade Tectonics 2018, pages 449–459, 2018. Link.
• - Ayman Wagdy, Sarah Mokhtar, and Amira Abdel-Rahman. "Parametric analysis of solar shading parameters in intermediate orientations located in desert climates". In Building Simulation Conference 2016 , 2016. Link.

Contact

• amira.abdel-rahman[at]cba[dot]mit[dot]edu