Marcia O’Malley, Thomas Michael Panos Family Professor in Mechanical Engineering and chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the George R. Brown School of Engineering and Computing at Rice University, was selected as one of the six winners of the 11th Nagamori awards. She will be recognized at the 11th Nagamori Awards commendation ceremony on September 7, 2025 in Kyoto, Japan.
This award is bestowed by a Japanese non-profit—Nagamori Foundation—that was established in 2014 to financially support and commend mid-career scientists and engineers who make significant contributions to research and development in motors, actuators, and power generators. These devices are critically important for our daily lives and account for more than 55% of world’s power consumption today.
“It is a distinct honor to be recognized for contributions to actuator design and control technology, and I’m grateful to the Nagamori Foundation for the opportunity to showcase our lab’s decades of work in this domain,” said O’Malley.
O’Malley was selected for her ‘contributions to the design of exoskeleton robots and implementation of shared control algorithms to assist upper limb movements.’ She develops robotic devices and control algorithms that enable physical interactions between humans and machines, with an emphasis on applications in rehabilitation of upper limb function and coordination for individuals who have suffered from stroke and spinal cord injury. Her approaches enable the robotic exoskeleton to estimate and provide the precise amount of assistance that the person needs to complete reaching movements.
In the domain of virtual reality, she has developed haptic, or touch, feedback devices like exoskeletons and other wearables that allow people to manipulate and feel virtual objects. Additionally, she has developed force feedback robots that allow humans to interact with remote environments while receiving touch and haptic feedback through wearables.
O’Malley has received several recognitions for her outstanding work, including the Office of Naval Research (ONR) Young Investigator Award and the NSF CAREER Award. She has also received the Presidential Mentoring Award and is a two-time recipient of the George R. Brown Award for Superior Teaching at Rice University. She is a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE). She has served as editor-in-chief of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation Conference Editorial Board, associate editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Haptics, chair of the ASME Robotics Public Policy Task Force and as a member of the ASME committee on government relations.