Malone Center member Axel Krieger, Engr ’08 (PhD) has been appointed as the Carol Croft Linde Faculty Scholar in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. The five-year scholarship was endowed by L. Gordon Croft, Engr ’56 to help the Whiting School retain outstanding faculty members.

Krieger’s work focuses on both the fundamental and translational development of novel tools, imaging, and robot control techniques for medical robotics. Specifically, he investigates methodologies that increase smartness and autonomy and improve image guidance of medical robots to perform previously impossible tasks, improve efficiency, and ultimately enhance patient outcomes.

As the director of the Intelligent Medical Robotic Systems and Equipment Lab, Krieger leads a team of students, scientists, and engineers in the research and development of robotic tools and laparoscopic devices. The team made international news in early 2022 when its Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot performed laparoscopic surgery on the soft tissue of a pig without the guiding hand of a human—a significant step toward fully automated surgery on humans.

Krieger completed his undergraduate and master’s degrees at the University of Karlsruhe in Germany and his doctorate at Johns Hopkins, where he pioneered an MRI-guided prostate biopsy robot used in more than 50 patient procedures at three hospitals. In 2022, he was awarded a prestigious NSF CAREER Award to support his research on advancing autonomy for soft tissue robotic surgery and interventions.

Krieger holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Computer Science and is a member of both the Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics and the Data Science and AI Institute. An inventor, he has more than 30 patents and patent applications.