Paris Myers is a passionate advocate and creator of interdisciplinary work and change.
​
Paris Myers (b. 2001) is an American-Canadian visual artist, designer, and engineer. Currently a researcher in Dr. Hugh Herr's Biomechatronics Lab at the MIT Media Lab, she is passionate about creating interdisciplinary solutions for human-robot systems.
​
As a Visiting Undergraduate Research Intern at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS),
Summer 2021, Paris worked in the Biorobotics Laboratory. There, she co-created an IRB approved study at the intersection of haptics, soft robotics, jamming, and installation art practices with Dr. Buse Aktas (Harvard), Professor Rob Howe (Harvard), and Professor Roberta Klatzky (Carnegie Mellon University) . Designed, fabricated, and executed in two months, this study had 44 human participants, and was the subject of Paris’ undergraduate honors thesis.
She is former gallery co-curator and coordinator with artist Joan Truckenbrod at Truckenbrod Gallery, and has exhibited her multi-media artwork alongside 150+ artists at the international IF Festival 2020 (Canada), in addition to more traditional galleries. Myers was a 2018 Artist In Residency at PLAYA at Summerlake Arts and Sciences residency. She is passionate about using art for social change. In March of 2020 she raised $10,000 via her online fundraiser, Paintings for Produce, to sponsor food baskets from local, organic farms for families impacted most by COVID-19. Each donor received a custom painting, resulting in 40+ original painted artworks.
​
As co-lead of Oregon State University’s first-ever Marine Energy Collegiate Competition 2020-2021 team, she oversaw a 20+ person team and a $20,000 awarded budget. Her team was one of 17 schools selected nationwide by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory to compete. Her team presented at ICOE 2021, and received two distinguished awards for engineering and community engagement from the U.S. Department of Energy. Myers will advise OSU’s 2022 MECC Team, which was officially selected by the U.S. DOE to receive $20,000 and compete. She was also a member of the 2020 engineering-design team WorthyWaves, a top 20 team nationally in the American Made Waves to Water Prize (DOE), winning $10,000 to build the design. She is also on the student leadership board for the Pacific Marine Energy Center (Oregon State, University of Washington, and University of Alaska).
In addition to her marine energy work, Paris was an undergraduate researcher in the Social Haptics, Assistive Robotics, and Embodiment Lab within Oregon State’s Collaborative Robotics and Intelligent Systems Institute. Her research was funded by both the DeLoach Research Award and the President's Commission on the Status of Women Scholarship, and was the topic for two publications: Women Are Funny: Influence of Apparent Gender and Embodiment in Robot Comedy, full paper accepted for The 13th International Conference on Social Robotics (ICSR), and Read the Room, Robot! Exploring Audiovisual Methods to Improve the Effectiveness of Robotic Comedians, a social robotics workshop paper presented at the 2020 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) in October, 2020. Inspired by the intersection of art, culture, and robotics, Paris solo-author the workshop paper Beyond the Cube: A Curatorial Reflection on the Portrayal of Humanoid Robots, and presented it at the 2021 IEEE ICRA workshop “Sentimental Machines.”
​
Paris earned a double HBS ('22) and HBFA ('22) in Bioengineering and Fine Art with minors in art history and popular music at Oregon State’s Honors College.
​
.jpg)