Purnendu
PhD Student
ATLAS Institute
purnendu@colorado.edu

Purnendu is a designer, trained as a physicist. He combines his love for design, physics and computers to develop new fabrication techniques for functional materials. He is a PhD student at the interdisciplinary ATLAS Institute advised by Carson Bruns and Greg Whiting. He holds an Integrated Master's degree in physics (with specialization in material science) from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Roorkee. Earlier, he 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. His work portfolio includes research at various institutions worldwide, including the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Germany, and Bauhaus University, Weimar, Germany.
 

Publications

  • Purnendu, Sasha M Novack, Eric Acome, Christoph Keplinger, Mirela Alistar, Mark D Gross, Carson Bruns, and Daniel Leithinger. 2021. Electriflow: Soft Electrohydraulic Building Blocks for Prototyping Shape-changing Interfaces. Designing Interactive Systems Conference 2021. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1280–1290. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3461778.3462093 (June 28-July 2, 2021–Virtual Event).
  • Purnendu, Eric Acome, Christoph Keplinger, Mark D. Gross, Carson Bruns and Daniel Leithinger. 2021. Soft Electrohydraulic Actuators for Origami Inspired Shape-Changing Interfaces. (to appear) In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2021). https://doi.org/10.1145/3411763.3451590. (Yokohama, Japan–May 8-13, 2021). pdf.

 

 

Member of the Laboratory for Emergent Nanomaterials  

THING Lab Alum

In the news

combined portrait shots of carson bruns and ellen do
Ellen Yi-Luen Do and Carson Bruns win graduate school awards for outstanding mentorship

May 4, 2022

Praised by their graduate students for their scientific competence, work ethic, creativity and compassion, two ATLAS professors received Outstanding Faculty Mentor awards from CU Boulder’s Graduate School on May 3, an honor bestowed this year on only 18 faculty members campus-wide.

Purnendu
Touching Virtual Reality

Feb. 9, 2022

Normally virtual surfaces cannot be felt because they aren't there. But at Reality Labs Research at Meta, (previously known as Facebook), ATLAS PhD Student Purnendu is researching soft, wearable devices–such as wristbands, rings or gloves –that could enable tactile sensations in virtual/augmented reality environments.

An origami butterfly
Augmenting Books With Tangible Animation

Jan. 31, 2022

SIGGRAPH sat down with Purnendu, a PhD student in the ATLAS Institute and a researcher at Meta Reality Labs, to talk about his team’s SIGGRAPH 2021 Labs project, “Electriflow: Augmenting Books With Tangible Animation Using Soft Electrohydraulic Actuators.” The team's actuator technology strives to augment animation within physical books.

a paper butterfly that is lifting off the page
Origami comes to life with new shape-changing materials

July 22, 2021

Imagine opening up a book of nature photos only to see a kaleidoscope of graceful butterflies flutter out from the page. Such fanciful storybooks might soon be possible thanks to the work of a team of designers and engineers at CU Boulder’s ATLAS Institute.