Buse Aktaş is an engineer and artist, and a new Max Planck Research Group Leader. She has an educational background in mechanical engineering, visual arts and design, work experience in the home appliances industry, and apprenticeships in several traditional crafts (e.g. broommaking, locksmithing). Her research focuses on developing new families of active materials and structures that enhance the mechanical interactions between robots and their environments. Her prior work focused on achieving multidimensional tunable mechanical behavior utilizing jamming - a phenomenon in which a cluster of components undergoes a phase-change based on the interactions between the individual components. She has designed, modeled, fabricated and tested families of jamming-based functional metamaterials, and showcased their robotic capabilities in applications such as robotic manipulators, medical robots (wearable and surgical), and interactive art.