His assistive robotics work, conducted with computer science grad students Gu Ye, Chris Bowen, and Jeff Ichnowski, is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and is a collaboration with the Division of Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy in the UNC School of Medicine. The needle steering project, funded by the National Institutes of Health, is also the work of grad students Sachin Patil and Luis Torres, and is a collaborative effort with the UNC School of Medicine, Vanderbilt University, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of California, Berkeley. To learn more, visit http://robotics.cs.unc.edu. At a glance: It’s much easier to build a robot than it is to make that robot do useful things.