Speakers


  • Prof. Dario Farina (Imperial College London, London, UK)

  • Mr. Freygardur Thorsteinsson (Össur hf., Reykjavik, Iceland)

  • Prof. Christian Cipriani (Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Italy)

  • Prof. Nicolas Garcia Aracil (University Miguel Hernandez de Elche, Spain)

  • Prof. Hermano Igo Krebs (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA)

  • Prof. Michelle Jillian Johnson (University of Pennsylvania, USA)

Dario Farina

Dario Farina received Ph.D. degrees in automatic control and computer science and in electronics and communications engineering from the Ecole Centrale de Nantes, Nantes, France, and Politecnico di Torino, Italy, in 2001 and 2002, respectively, and an Honorary Doctorate degree in Medicine from Aalborg University, Denmark, in 2018. He is currently Full Professor and Chair in Neurorehabilitation Engineering at the Department of Bioengineering of Imperial College London, UK. He has previously been Full Professor at Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark, (until 2010) and at the University Medical Center Göttingen, Georg-August University, Germany, where he founded and directed the Department of Neurorehabilitation Systems (2010-2016). Among other awards, he has been the recipient of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society Early Career Achievement Award (2010), The Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award (2016), and has been elected Distinguished Lecturer IEEE (2014). He has also received continuous funding by the European Research Council since 2011. His research focuses on biomedical signal processing, neurorehabilitation technology, and neural control of movement. Professor Farina has been the President of the International Society of Electrophysiology and Kinesiology (ISEK) (2012-2014) and is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the official Journal of this Society, the Journal of Electromyography and Kinesiology. He is also currently an Editor for Science Advances, IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, IEEE Transactions on Medical Robotics and Bionics, Wearable Technologies, the Journal of Physiology, and IEEE Reviews in Biomedical Engineering. Professor Farina has been elected Fellow IEEE, AIMBE, ISEK, EAMBES.

Mr. Freygardur Thorsteinsson

Mr. Freygardur Thorsteinsson is a Grant Application manager in the R&D department of Össur. He got his B.Sc. and B.Sc.Hons. degree in chemistry from the University of Iceland and M.Sc. degree in chemical engineering at the Technical University of Denmark in Copenhagen in 1989. He was a material scientist at the Technological Institute of Iceland for 10 years before joining Össur in summer 1999. He has been leading Össur’s part in several international research projects, He has been active in work on testing and standards and he served 8 years on the board of Eurolab Iceland, thereof 2 years as chairman. He was representing Össur as a member of ISO/TC 168/WG 3 working group on testing standards in prosthetics from 2009-2013. He was a board member for the National Research Fund in Iceland from 2012 to 2019, serving as vice-chairman from 2016-2019. He is inventor or co-inventor of more than 20 patents.

Christian Cipriani

Prof. Christian Cipriani is the Director of the BioRobotics Institute of the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna and Head of the Artificial Hands Area. His field of research is (bio)mechatronics applied to the area of upper limb prosthetics.

From 2014 to 2016 he was an Associate Professor of Bioengineering at the BioRobotics Institute of SSSA also serving as Deputy Director (2014-2017). In 2012 he has been a Visiting Scientist with the Biomechatronics Development Lab at University of Colorado Denver | Anschutz Medical Campus, with a Fulbright Scholarship. He received the Ph.D. in Biorobotics Science and Engineering from a joint program between IMT Institute for Advanced Studies, Lucca and Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna in 2008, and the Laurea degree in Electronic Engineering (MSc) with full marks from the University of Pisa, Italy in 2004.

He has coordinated several national and international research projects and authored 150+ peer reviewed scientific papers, 80+ of which on international journals. His current research is sponsored by the Italian Workers’ Compensation Authority (INAIL), the Italian Ministry of University and Research (MIUR), the European Commission (EC), and the European Research Council (ERC).

He is the founder of Prensilia S.r.l., a spin-off company of SSSA that develops and commercializes robotic hands.

Nicolas Garcia Aracil

Nicolas Garcia-Aracil, PhD is Associate Professor of Control and Systems Engineering at Miguel Hernandez University (Spain). He holds a M.Sc. in Control Engineering by the University of Murcia (1996, Spain), Master in Design, Robotics and Industrial Automation from University of Murcia (Spain) 1996-1997 and a PhD in Control Engineering by the Miguel Hernandez University of Elche (Spain). He has been appointed as Visiting Scientist at INRIA (Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique), Sophia Antipolis, FRANCE), in 2003 and at Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics, DLR, Oberpfaffenhofen-Wessling, Germany, in 2006. His current research interests are medical and surgical robotics, rehabilitation robotics, medical image, computer vision, human-robot Interaction and design and control of new robotic devices. Dr. Nicolas Garcia was a 2004 recipient of the Best Thesis in Roboticsˇ, National Research Prize, from the Spanish Federation of Automatic control. He is author or co-author of a broad range of research publications. He served as Program Chair of the 2012 IEEE RAS\\EMBS International Conference on Biomedical Robotics and Biomechatronics (BIOROB, Roma, Italy) and the General Chair of EURON Winter School on Rehabilitation Robotics (Elche, Spain).

Hermano Igo Krebs

Dr. Hermano Igo Krebs is a Principal Research Scientist and Lecturer at MIT’s Mechanical Engineering Department and the Director of The77Lab (http://the77lab.mit.edu/). He holds an affiliate position as an Adjunct Professor at University of Maryland School of Medicine, Department of Neurology, and as a Visiting Professor at Fujita Health University, Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation (Japan), at Osaka University, Mechanical Science and Bioengineering Department (Japan), and at Loughborough University, Rehabilitation Robotics of The Wolfson School of Mechanical, Electrical, and Manufacturing Engineering (UK). He is a Fellow of the IEEE and was nominated to this distinguished engineering status “for contributions to rehabilitation robotics and the understanding of neuro-rehabilitation.” He received “The 2009 Isabelle and Leonard H. Goldenson Technology and Rehabilitation Award,” from the Cerebral Palsy International Research Foundation (CPIRF), the 2015 IEEE-INABA Technical Award for Innovation leading to Production “for contributions to medical technology innovation and translation into commercial applications for Rehabilitation Robotics,” and he was selected as a 2021 IEEE-EMBS Distinguished Lecturer (2021/2022). He was one of the founders, member of the Board of Directors, and the Chairman of the Board of Directors of Interactive Motion Technologies from 1998 to 2016. He successfully sold it to Bionik Laboratories, a publicly traded company, where he served as its Chief Science Officer and as a member of the Board of Directors until July 2017. He later founded 4Motion Robotics.

Michelle Jillian Johnson

Michelle J. Johnson, Ph.D., is currently Associate professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation at the University of Pennsylvania. She has a secondary appointment as an Associate professor in Bioengineering and is a member of the Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics graduate group. She has a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics from the University of Pennsylvania and a PhD in Mechanical Engineering, with an emphasis in mechatronics, robotics, and design, from Stanford University. She completed a NSF-NATO post- doctoral fellowship at the Advanced Robotics Technology and Systems Laboratory at the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Italy. She directs the Rehabilitation Robotic Research and Design Laboratory located at the Pennsylvania Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, School of Medicine. The lab is also affiliated with the General Robotics Automation Sensing Perception (GRASP) Lab. Dr. Johnson’s lab specializes in the design, development, and therapeutic use of novel, affordable, intelligent robotic assistants for rehabilitation in high and low- resource environments with an emphasis on using robotics and sensors to quantify upper limb motor function in adults and children with brain injury or at risk for brain injury. Dr. Johnson has spent over twenty years applying technology solutions to aid in the understanding of disability and impairment after brain injury. She is currently a Fulbright Scholar for 2020-2022 to Botswana and an IEEE Engineering in Biology and Medicine Society Distinguished Lecturer 2021- 2022.