Speakers

Nedim Goktepe completed his Master's in Cognitive Science at Ruhr University, Bochum, before starting his Ph.D. at Philipps University, Marburg. Following his degree, he held a postdoctoral position in Haplab at Justus Liebig University, Giessen. He is currently part of the Interactive Surfaces group in INM - Leibniz Institute for New Materials. He recently received the Innovation in Haptics award, supported by the IEEE Technical Committee on Haptics of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society. He is primarily interested in eye movements, visual, haptic, and multisensory perception of materials, and psychophysics.

Roland Bennewitz received his Diploma degree in Experimental Physics from the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, in 1993 and his Ph.D. degree also from Freie Universität Berlin in 1997. From 1997 to 2004, he was a research assistant at the University of Basel. From 2004 to 2008, he was Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and held the Canada Research Chair in Experimental Nanomechanics. Since 2008, he leads the Research Department ‘Interactive Surfaces’ at the INM Leibniz-Institute for New Materials in Saarbrücken, Germany, and is Professor for Experimental Physics at Saarland University. His research interests comprise nano-mechanics and the role of contact mechanics in the haptic perception of materials.

Michaël Wiertlewski is an Associate Professor at the Cognitive Robotics Department of the TU Delft in the Netherlands. He obtained his Ph.D. degree at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie under the auspices of the Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique (CEA-LIST) in Fontenay- aux-Roses, France. In 2012, he joined the Neuroscience and Robotics (NxR) lab at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL, USA where he studied the physics of ultrasonic friction modulation. From 2015 to 2019, he was CNRS Chargé de Recherche at Aix-Marseille university. He received the Early Career Award from the Technical Committee on Haptics in 2017. His main research interests include the design of tactile interfaces, the physics of skin/surface interaction, and tactile perception. 

Ryo Kitada received his Ph.D. from Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan, in 2005. He subsequently worked as a Research Fellow at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. From 2008 to 2016, he served as an Assistant Professor at the National Institute for Physiological Sciences in Okazaki, Japan. Between 2017 and 2022, he was a Nanyang Associate Professor in the School of Social Sciences at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He is currently a Professor at the Graduate School of Intercultural Studies, Kobe University, Kobe, Japan. His research interests include human multisensory perception, social cognition, and neuroscience.