On May 28, 2026, upon the invitation of Professor Yan Chen, Professor Guo Zhan Lum from Nanyang Technological University visited the Motion Laboratory at Tianjin University and delivered a remarkable academic report titled "Highly functional miniature soft robots: towards transformative medicine."

        In his report, Professor Lum introduced the latest research progress of Magnetic Miniature Robots (MMRs) in the field of transformative medicine. He pointed out that magnetic miniature robots, as cable-free small-scale actuators controllable by magnetic fields, can non-invasively access highly confined and enclosed spaces, demonstrating tremendous application potential in robotics, materials science, and biomedicine. However, current miniature robots mostly feature five degrees of freedom (five-DOF), as it is difficult to effectively control their magnetic moment vectors using external magnetic fields. Additionally, the lack of soft-bodied functionalities has critically limited their widespread adoption. Professor Lum's team has innovatively developed magnet design and fabrication methods that successfully achieve six-DOF control, enabling optimally designed miniature robots to generate 51 to 297 times greater six-DOF torque than existing small-scale magnetic actuators. The team also proposed a universal six-DOF actuation method applicable to both rigid and soft miniature robots. Under precise orientation control, the optimal miniature robots can reliably execute full six-DOF motions, achieving six-DOF angular velocities of up to 173 degrees per second. The soft miniature robots developed by the team demonstrated unprecedented functionalities: a six-DOF jellyfish-like robot could swim across barriers impassable by existing similar devices, and a six-DOF gripper completed complex small-scale assembly tasks 20 times faster than its five-DOF predecessor. Furthermore, the team developed a soft miniature robot capable of dispensing four types of drugs with reprogrammable drug-dispensing sequences and dosages, enabling precise multi-drug delivery and providing novel solutions for targeted combination therapy. In their latest work, the team created an MMR that can be magnetically reprogrammed upon demand to dispense drugs, cut, grasp and store biological tissues, and perform hyperthermia treatments, holding great potential to make future minimally invasive treatments significantly safer and painless.

        Professor Guo Zhan Lum received his dual Ph.D. degrees from Nanyang Technological University and Carnegie Mellon University in 2016. From 2016 to 2017, he was a post-doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Germany. Since 2018, Professor Lum has joined Nanyang Technological University as a faculty member and is currently a tenured Associate Professor. To date, Professor Lum has published 21 journal papers in top-tier journals including Nature, PNAS, Advanced Materials, and Science Advances, with several selected as journal covers for Advanced Materials. His research has been reported by more than 130 international media outlets, including but not limited to the BBC, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. In 2025, his Nature paper co-authored with Professor Metin Sitti was awarded the prestigious Frontiers of Science Award by the International Congress on Basic Science (ICBS). His research interests cover miniature robots, soft robots, magnetic actuation systems, and biomedical applications.