Craig Shultz (he/him/his)

Craig is a post doctoral researcher and Swartz Innovation Commercialization Fellow at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in the Future Interfaces Group. He specializes in interactive embedded systems and haptic actuation. His work has won 6 best paper awards and nominations at premiere ACM and IEEE venues and was recently featured on NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt.

Before CMU, Craig was the VP of Research and Development at Tanvas, where he developed novel electroadhesive touchscreens based on his pioneering PhD work in surface haptics at Northwestern University's Center for Robotics and Biosystems.

Craig is currently on the job market, pursuing a broad academic search. Click here for a current copy of his CV

Research

I invent, build, and evaluate novel interaction technologies that open the door to wholly new computing experiences, with a particular focus on tactile interfaces. The sense of touch remains underutilized when it comes to how we interact with computers. I believe the primary reason for this is the lack of sophisticated and functional haptic displays and the underdevelopment of haptic design practice and science needed to successfully implement and proliferate them.

I pioneer such haptic technologies using an inherently interdisciplinary approach, pulling from domains of psychophysics and electrical, mechanical, and computer engineering to prototype functional hardware platforms. I also use ideation and exploration techniques from human-computer interaction (HCI) research to evaluate use cases in contemporary computing contexts, such as IoT, physical computing, VR/XR, mobile devices, and wearables.

I mature especially promising technologies using a scientific engineering approach, which involves diving deeply into the physical operating principles of the device and its perceptual effects on users in order to refine core capabilities and enable new functionality. The long term goal of my research is to elevate haptic rendering to the sophistication level of graphics and audio systems through the development of practical, tactile hardware and software systems capable of rendering complex haptic signals relevant to perception and user experience.