Rate My Professor Ryan St. Pierre

Ryan St. Pierre is an Assistant Professor in both the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering within the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the University at Buffalo. He earned his PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Maryland in 2018, with a research focus on small-scale locomotion, and holds MS and BS degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Northeastern University, both awarded in 2012. In his current roles, St. Pierre directs the Robot Form and Function Lab, investigating microrobots, insect biomechanics, and microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). His work draws on microsystems, robotics, and organismal biology to analyze highly dynamic biological systems and engineer microrobot analogs operating at small size scales. Key research areas include design and manufacturing, as well as dynamics and control. He teaches a range of courses, such as CSE 241 Digital Systems in the spring semesters since 2025, MAE 334 Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Lab I across multiple spring terms from 2023 to 2026, and MAE 476 and MAE 576 Mechatronics in fall semesters from 2023 to 2026, along with special topics courses like MAE 500 and MAE 505 in 2021 and 2022.

St. Pierre's contributions to the field have been recognized with the Best Paper award at the 2018 Solid-State Sensors, Actuators, and Microsystems Workshop for his publication 'A 3D-printed 1 mg legged microrobot running at 15 body lengths per second' (with Gosrich, W., and Bergbreiter, S.), coverage in IEEE Spectrum, and inclusion on the 2020 Forbes 30 Under 30 Science list. Selected key publications include 'Latch-based control of energy output in spring actuated systems' (Divi, S. et al., Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 2020), 'Viscoelastic legs for open-loop control of gram-scale robots' (St. Pierre, R. et al., Bioinspiration & Biomimetics, 2020), 'Toward Autonomy in Sub-Gram Terrestrial Robots' (St. Pierre, R., and Bergbreiter, S., Annual Review of Control, Robotics, and Autonomous Systems, 2019), 'Design and control of jumping microrobots with torque reversal latches' (Skowronski, N. et al., 2024), and 'Multi-modal jumping and crawling in an autonomous, springtail-inspired microrobot' (Singh, S., Temel, Z., and St. Pierre, R., 2024 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation). His office is in 244 Bell Hall, Buffalo, NY 14260, with phone (716) 645-1451.