Markus Nemitz Named Inaugural Jon Levy Faculty Fellow

Markus Nemitz, assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering with a secondary appointment in the Department of Computer Science, has been named the inaugural Jon Levy Faculty Fellow. The fellowship, and his promotion to associate professor with tenure, take effect September 1, 2026. The five-year fellowship is supported by the endowed Jon Levy Faculty Fellowship Fund, established in 2023 by Jon A. Levy, E83, a Tufts alumnus and member of the School of Engineering Board of Advisors. Levy established the fund to support mid-career faculty as they balance teaching and advising with research programs and scholarly work. 

Nemitz’s research is guided by a single vision: the development, control, and real-world deployment of large robot collectives, hundreds of robots at a time, that can be rapidly redesigned and still mass manufactured at their point of impact, where they are needed, when they are needed. 

The group’s driving application is the removal of unexploded ordnance, which kills or injures more than 5,000 people every year–the majority of them civilians, and a large share of them children, with casualties rising amid ongoing conflicts. Nemitz designs robots that cost less than the landmines they are sent to find and detonate, each robot trading itself for the mine it removes. He aims to upend the economics of unexploded ordnance, where clearing a mine has long cost far more than laying one. This work spans low-cost intelligence, design for manufacturing, automated robot discovery and manufacture, self-correcting additive manufacturing, and the individual and collective control of large groups of robots.

Nemitz earned his Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh, trained as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, and served on the faculty of the Robotics Engineering Department at Worcester Polytechnic Institute from 2020 to 2024 before joining Tufts. In 2023, Nemitz received a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award for his work on resilient, 3D-printable robots. His research has also been supported by the NSF Center for Robots and Sensors for Human Wellbeing (ROSE-HUB), the U.S. Army, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. 

Most recently, his group received NSF funding to develop EvoFab, a robotic factory that designs, fabricates, and tests soft robots using evolutionary approaches, and an award from the Office of Naval Research to develop 3D-printed, crab-inspired swarm robots that can be deployed from the air and operate both on land and in water for unexploded ordnance disposal.

Learn more about Nemitz and the Nemitz Robotics Group.