Barbara Mazzolai is the Associate Director for Robotics and the Director of the Bioinspired Soft Robotics Laboratory at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT), Genoa. From February 2011 to March 2021, she served as the Director of the IIT Center for Micro-BioRobotics (CMBR).

Barbara Mazzolai is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) of the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (Tübingen and Stuttgart, Germany), of the SAB of the Max Planck Queensland Centre (MPQC) for the Materials Science of Extracellular Matrices, as well as of the Advisory Committee of the Cluster on Living Adaptive and Energy-autonomous Materials Systems - livMatS (Freiburg, Germany).

As of 2024, she has been a contract professor for a course in soft robotics in the Department of Mechanics at the Polytechnic of Milan. Currently, she is Member of the Administrative Committee (AdCom) of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, and Deputy Editor-in-chief of Soft Robotics Journal.

Since 2022, she is Member of the International Research and Innovation Advisory Board (IRIAB) of the University Campus Bio-Medico of Rome (UCBM). In 2017, she was a Visiting Faculty at the Aerial Robotics Lab, Department of Aeronautics, at Imperial College London.

Her research work revolves around bioinspired soft robotics, where she combines principles from both biology and engineering to advance technological innovation and scientific knowledge. She has been the Coordinator of several EU-funded projects in this field, including PLANTOID, GrowBot, and I-SEED. In May 2021, she began her European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant titled "I-Wood," focusing on Forest Intelligence: robotic networks inspired by the Wood Wide Web. She is an author and co-author of more than 260 papers published in international journals, books, and conference proceedings.

Cecilia Laschi is Provost’s Chair Professor at the National University of Singapore, Director of Advanced Robotics Centre and Co-Director of CARTIN – Centre for Advanced Robotics Technology and Innovation. She is on leave from Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Italy, The BioRobotics Institute. She graduated in Computer Science at University of Pisa and received a Ph.D. in Robotics from University of Genoa. She received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Southern Denmark, Odense.

Cecilia Laschi is best-known for her research in soft robotics, an area that she pioneered and contributed to develop at international level. She uses a bioinspired approach starting from the octopus as a model for robotics. She explores marine applications of soft robots and their use in the biomedical field, specifically in eldercare.

She is IEEE Fellow and IEEE Robotics & Automation Society (RAS) member, serving twice as Administrative Committee (AdCom) member. She founded the 1st IEEE International Conference on Soft Robotics (RoboSoft) in 2018, serving now in its Advisory Committee. She co-founded the Technical Committee on Soft Robotics. She has been Program Chair of IROS in 2018 and in 2024. Still for IEEE RAS, she is Senior Editor of IEEE Robotics & Automation Letters.

Dr. Hannah Stuart is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of California at Berkeley. She received her BS in Mechanical Engineering at the George Washington University in 2011, and her MS and PhD in Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University in 2013 and 2018, respectively. Recent awards include the NSF CAREER grant and NASA Early Career Faculty grant.

Robert Baines is a postdoctoral fellow at ETH Zurich. He is the recipient of the Branco Weiss Society in Science Fellowship and ETH postdoctoral fellowship, and was recently named a Robosoft Rising Star and RSS Pioneer. His research investigates the juncture of robot structural design, control, and material composition, and seeks both fundamental scientific advances and to realize disruptive robotic applications in the real world.

Feifei Qian is an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Southern California. Qian received her PhD in Electrical Engineering and M.S. in Physics from Georgia Institute of Technology. Prior to her appointment at USC, she worked in the GRASP lab at University of Pennsylvania as a postdoctoral fellow. Her research interests include bio-inspired robotics, legged locomotion, terrain mechanics, proprioceptive sensing and human-robot teaming, with applications to robot-aided earth and planetary explorations. Qian’s research has been recognized with NSF CAREER award, best student paper award from the Robotics Science and Systems (RSS) conference, and has been featured in many media press including BBC News, CBS News, Reuters, NPR Weekend Edition, IEEE Spectrum, Wired, and R&D Magazine. She serves as the Organizing Committee for the 2025 Robotics Science and Systems (RSS) conference, Associated Editor for the 2023 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Program Committee for the 25th International Conference on Climbing and Walking Robots (CLAWAR), the 2021 Robotics Science and Systems (RSS) Inclusion Program, and the 2019 Robotics Science and Systems (RSS) Pioneer Program.

Pakpong Chirarattananon is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the City University of Hong Kong and is transitioning to join the University of Toronto. He received his Ph.D. in Engineering Sciences from Harvard University and his B.A. in Natural Sciences from the University of Cambridge. His research is primarily centered on biologically inspired robotic systems, micro aerial vehicles, and hybrid locomotion. Pakpong has developed highly efficient revolving-wing drones, flapping-wing robots, and multimodal multirotors, with publications in prestigious journals such as Science, Nature, and Science Robotics. His contributions to the field have been recognized with numerous accolades, including the 2021 IEEE Transactions on Robotics King-Sun Fu Memorial Best Paper Award.

Dr. Daniel I. Goldman is a Professor in the School of Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Prof. Goldman became a faculty member at Georgia Tech in January 2007. He is an adjunct member of the School of Biology. He is also the co-founder of Ground Control Robotics, Inc, a startup commercializing multilegged elongate robots for use in precision agriculture. Prof. Goldman's research program broadly investigates the interaction of biological and physical systems with complex materials like granular media. In particular, he integrates laboratory experiments, computer simulation, and physical and mathematical models to discover principles of movement of a diversity of animals and robots in controlled laboratory substrates. He received his S.B. in physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1994. He received his PhD in Physics in 2002 from the University of Texas at Austin, studying nonlinear dynamics and granular media. From 2003-2007 he did postdoctoral work in the Department of Integrative Biology at UC Berkeley studying locomotion biomechanics.  Prof. Goldman is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS), was a Dunn Family Professor at Georgia Tech, a Georgia Power Professor of Excellence, and has received an NSF CAREER/PECASE award, a DARPA Young Faculty Award, a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award at the Scientific Interface, and the UT Austin Outstanding Dissertation in Physics (2002-2003). He is a member of the Advisory Board of the journal Science Robotics.