Speakers

Bio: Dr. Laura Blumenschein is an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University. Laura received a Masters of Science in Mechanical Engineering at Rice University under Marcia O’Malley and a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford in 2019 under the supervision of Professor Allison Okamura. Their research focuses on creating more robust and adaptable soft robots: this includes soft robots inspired by plants and soft haptic devices which allow for more seamless human-robot interaction. Laura has been recognized by MIT Technology Review as a 35 Under 35 Innovator and received an NSF graduate research fellowship. Their work on plant-inspired growing robots has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Popular Science, Wired, and on CBS’s Innovation Nation.

Title: Soft Robot Design as Planning and Control: Leveraging Parallel Simulation to Create Contact-Aware Behaviors

Bio: Daniel Bruder is an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan. Prior to this appointment, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University. He received a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the University of Michigan in 2020 and a B.S. degree in engineering sciences from Harvard University in 2013. He is a recipient of the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and the Richard and Eleanor Towner Prize for Outstanding Ph.D. Research. His research interests include the design, modeling, and control of robotic systems, especially soft robots.

Title: Leveraging data, physical models, and the Koopman operator to make soft robots more capable

Bio: Cosimo Della Santina holds a BSc in Computer Engineering and a MSc in Robotics and Control Theory from the University of Pisa. He was a Ph.D. student at the University of Pisa and IIT, a visiting researcher and postdoc at MIT-CSAIL, and a senior postdoc and later a lecturer at TUM. He is now Associate Professor at TU Delft (CoR, Mechanical Engineering), and a researcher at the German Aerospace Center (DLR).

Title: Breaking the softness vs performance trade-off in soft robotics with good old model based control.

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Bio: Fanny Ficuciello received the Laurea degree magna cum laude in Mechanical Engineering and the PhD degree in Computer and Automation Engineering, both at the University of Naples Federico II in 2007 and 2010, respectively. Currently, she is an Associate Professor of Robotics and Control at the University of Naples Federico II. She is responsible for the scientific research in medical robotics at the Robotics Lab of ICAROS Centre (Interdepartmental Centre for Advances in Robotic Surgery). She is the Vice-director of the ICAROS Centre. She is the scientific director of the Biomimetics and Biohybrid Robotics Lab, Dept. of EE & IT, Univ. Naples Federico II, Italy. She is a member of Prisma Lab of the University of Naples Federico II.

Her research activity is focused on biomechanical design and bio-aware control strategies for anthropomorphic artificial hands, grasping and manipulation with hand/arm and dual-arm robotic systems, surgical robotics and rehabilitation robotics, human-robot interaction control, variable impedance control, and redundancy resolution strategies. She has published more than 150 journal and conference papers and book chapters, and holds four medical device patents.

Since 2008, she has been a member of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, and in 2017 she was upgraded to IEEE Senior Member. Currently, she serves as Editor for the Frontiers Journal of Robotics and AI in the Section Biomedical Robotics, and as Associate Editor for the Journal of Intelligent Service Robotics (JIST) and the Transactions on Medical Robotics and Bionics (TMRB). She serves on the editorial boards of prestigious robotics conferences.

Title: Soft robots for safe and effective manipulation in the medical domain

Bio: Ervin Kamenar is an Associate Professor at the University of Rijeka, Faculty of Engineering, where he lectures in mechatronics and robotics. He holds a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering and M.Sc. and B.Sc. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Rijeka. He initiated and led the development of the Mechatronics and Robotics study program (2024) and currently serves as its Director. His research focuses on mechatronics, soft robotics, precision engineering, and Koopman-operator-based modeling and control. Ervin also serves as a consultant for AIMdyn Inc. (USA) on generative AI, dynamical systems, and Koopman-operator-based modeling and analysis. He has undertaken multiple visiting research appointments at the University of California, Santa Barbara, including a Fulbright Visiting Professorship. Recently, he was awarded a Croatian Science Foundation project, “Advanced soft robots: data-driven development, modeling and control,” which explores the application of soft robotics and Koopman-based methodologies in robotic rehabilitation systems.

Title: From Koopman Soft Robot Control to EMG-Informed Rehabilitation Devices

Bio: Robert Katzschmann is an Assistant Professor of Robotics at ETH Zurich and the founder of the Soft Robotics Lab, where he develops new robotic morphologies for a future of life-like robots that seamlessly integrate with us. Robert is also the cofounder and scientific advisor of mimic robotics, which develops autonomous dexterous manipulation solutions.  He holds a Diplom-Ingenieur from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), wrote his master thesis at Stanford University (2013), and earned his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) in 2018.

Title: Control Principles for Musculoskeletal and Biohybrid Robots

Bio: Marc Killpack completed his Ph.D. in Robotics from the Georgia Institute of Technology and joined BYU as an Assistant Professor in December of 2013. His areas of expertise include soft robotics, human-robot interaction, controls, mechanics and perception for robotics and other automated systems. His current research interests relate to improving modeling and control for robot manipulation in unstructured and difficult environments. This includes applications related to search and rescue, disaster response and human robot interaction. While at Georgia Tech in the Healthcare Robotics Lab (HRL), Marc worked on projects including sensing and control for mobile robot bases, automating learning from robot grasping, manipulation around and interacting with human subjects, and control of a robot arm in cluttered and unmodeled environments. Prior to joining HRL, he completed Masters degrees in Mechanical Engineering from both Georgia Tech and AM Paris Tech (formerly ENSAM) in Metz, France. In 2007, Marc graduated with a Bachelor's of Science in Mechanical Engineering from Brigham Young University.

Title: Enabling Dynamic and High-Force Tasks with Soft Robotics and Control

Bio: Girish Krishnan is an Associate Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is also a Health Innovation Professor at the Carle Illinois College of Medicine and a co-director for the Hoeft Technology and Management program. He obtained his PhD from University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and masters from the Indian Institute of Science. His research is in the intersection of design and robotics, and particularly in soft robotics with applications in agriculture and healthcare. Prof. Krishnan is the recipient of the 2015 NSF Early Career award (CAREER), 2016 UIUC council award for excellence in advising, 2017 Freudestein Young Investigator award (ASME) and several best paper awards. He has published around 40 peer-reviewed journals, 50 conference proceedings, and holds four patents. 

Title: Soft robot autonomy for horticulture

Bio: Prof. C.A. Monje has been working in robotics and control for over 20 years. Her work on soft robotics and systems control is internationally recognized. She has actively collaborated with research centers in the United States, France, Germany, Italy, and Singapore. As the Principal Investigator (PI) of the Soft Robotics Laboratory of the UC3M RoboticsLab, with a strong expertise in soft robots prototyping, modeling and control, she has been PI of numerous research projects and has published 200+ papers on robotics and control, with h-index 31 and 8600+ cites. 

Some awards and recognitions: Member of the Jury of the “Princesa de Asturias” Award (2020-2023, 2025); “Talento Emergente” Award – Cyberlideria (2025); “Women Space” Award (2024); “TALGO Excelencia Profesional de la Mujer en Ingeniería” Award (finalist) (2022, 2023, 2024); “Top 100  Mujeres Líderes en España, Categoría Investigadoras” Award (2021); “Gigante Extremeño” Award (2019); “Ada Byron a la Mujer Tecnóloga de la Universidad de Deusto” Award (2019); “Excelencia Investigadora de la Universidad Carlos III de Madrid” Award (2018); “Mujer y Tecnología de la Fundación Orange” Award (2018); “Mejor Científica Contemporánea – QUO-CSIC” Award (2017); European Doctorate Distinction and Doctorate Extraordinary Award (2006).

Title: Simplicity in the design and control of soft robots

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Kirstin H. Petersen is an Associate Professor and Aref and Manon Lahham Faculty Fellow in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University. Her research focuses on collective embodied intelligence, with an emphasis on developing distributed control strategies for robot swarms inspired by natural systems.

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Entangled Robot Matter

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Kenji Tahara received his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering (1998), M.S. in Information Science and Systems (2000), and Ph.D. in Robotics (2003) from Ritsumeikan University, Japan. He served as a Research Scientist at the Bio-Mimetic Control Research Center, RIKEN (2003–2007), before joining Kyushu University in 2007 as a tenure-track Associate Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study. He became a tenured Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering in 2011 and was promoted to Full Professor in 2020. He was a Visiting Professor at the Learning Algorithms and Systems Laboratory (LASA), EPFL (2013–2014), and at the Manufacturing and Automation Laboratory (MAL), Stony Brook University (2017). His research interests include robotic manipulation, multi-fingered hands, force control, and soft robotics.

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Dexterous In-Hand Manipulation by a Pair of Robotic Fingers Combining Soft and Rigid Parts

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