Dr. Michael Yip is Co-Founder of Channel Robotics and a Full Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UC San Diego, where he directs the Advanced Robotics and Controls Laboratory (ARCLab) and the Healthcare and Medical Robotics Collaboratory.

Dr. Yip earned his BS in Mechatronics Engineering from the University of Waterloo, his MS in Electrical Engineering from the University of British Columbia, and his PhD in Bioengineering from Stanford University.

Dr. Yip was named Faculty Innovator of the Year at UC San Diego in 2024, elected as a Senior Member of the U.S. National Academy of Inventors, and has been recognized with the NSF CAREER award and NIH Trailblazer award.

A former Disney Imagineer and Faculty Consultant to Amazon Robotics, Dr. Yip manages a $15M portfolio of medical robotics programs and has received multiple best paper awards at top robotics and AI conferences including ICRA.

Channel Robotics, which emerged from Dr. Yip's UCSD research lab, is pioneering AI-assisted handheld robotic endoscopy tools to democratize access to robotic surgery, with research cited over 9,700 times on Google Scholar.