The Speakers

Dr. M. Janneke Schwaner (Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems)

Talk Title: The neuromechanics of agility: from walking to jumping

M. Janneke Schwaner is an Independent Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Stuttgart, where she leads the Neuromechanics of Movement Group. She is a recipient of the prestigious VENI grant as well as a Marie-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship, whose research she carried out at KU Leuven. Before Leuven, Dr. Schwaner was a postdoc with Prof. Monica Daley at UC Irvine, and completed her PhD at the University of Idaho. Dr. Schwaner's research focuses on the biomechanics and neural control of extreme and unsteady organismal behaviors with the aim to identify physical mechanisms used to overcome mechanical constraints in natural environments. With the use of engineering tools, she hopes to reveal underlying rules and limits to performance, and ways organisms circumvent these limits, with the ultimate aim to better understand system components, control, and internal energy flows of elastic systems.

Prof. Mahdi Tavakoli (University of Alberta)

Talk Title: Control Strategies for Soft Tissue Manipulation: From Feedback Systems to Learning-Based Approaches

Mahdi Tavakoli is a Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and the Biomedical Engineering Department and a Senior University of Alberta Engineering Research Chair in Healthcare Robotics. He is also Scientific Vice-Director for the Institute for Smart Augmentative and Restorative Technologies (iSMART) at the University of Alberta. He received his PhD degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Western Ontario, Canada, in 2005. From 2006 to 2008, he was a post-doctoral researcher at Canadian Surgical Technologies and Advanced Robotics (CSTAR), Canada, and an NSERC Post-Doctoral Fellow at Harvard University, USA. Dr. Tavakoli’s research interests involve medical robotics, image-guided surgery, and rehabilitation robotics. Dr. Tavakoli is the lead author of Haptics for Teleoperated Surgical Robotic Systems (World Scientific, 2008) and the Specialty Chief Editor for Frontiers in Robotics and AI (Robot Design Section). He is a Senior Member of IEEE and an Associate Editor for the International Journal of Robotics Research, IEEE Transactions on Medical Robotics and Bionics, IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics’ Focused Section with Advanced Intelligent Mechatronics, and Journal of Medical Robotics Research.

Prof. Cosimo Della Santina (TU Delft)

Talk Title: Learning physically consistent models of soft robots for use in model-based control

Cosimo Della Santina (Senior Member, IEEE) received the Ph.D. degree (cum laude) in robotics from the University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy, in 2019. From 2017 to 2019, he was a visiting Ph.D. student and a Postdoc with the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was a Senior Postdoc and a Guest Lecturer with the Department of Informatics, Technical University of Munich, in 2020 and 2021, respectively. He is currently an Associate Professor with TU Delft, Delft, The Netherlands, and a Research Scientist with German Aerospace Institute (DLR), Munich, Germany. His research interests include providing motor intelligence to physical systems, focusing on elastic and soft robots. Dr. Santina was the recipient of several awards, including the Eurobotics Georges Giralt Ph.D. Award in 2020 and the IEEE RAS Early Academic Career Award in 2023. He was a recipient of an NWO VENI. He is involved as PI in a number of European and Dutch Projects, and he is the co-director of Delft AI Lab SELF.

Prof. Federico Renda (Khalifa University)

Talk Title: Analytical derivative of slender soft robot dynamics for simulation and optimal control

Dr. Federico Renda is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi, UAE. Before joining Khalifa University, he was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the BioRobotics Institute of Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, where he received his Ph.D. degree in 2014. He obtained his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in biomedical engineering from the University of Pisa, Italy, in 2007 and 2009, respectively. Dr. Renda has been a visiting professor at the National University of Singapore (NUS), the National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology (INRIA, Lille), and others. He has been appointed as Associate Editor and Program Committee Member of important robotics journals and conferences, such as the International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR) and the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), to name a few. Dr. Renda's research interests encompass the study of multibody dynamical systems, including modeling and control of complex soft and underwater robots, focusing on the application of the principles of geometric mechanics. His research is applied to the agile motion of highly deformable manipulators as well as underwater swarm robotics for persistent surveillance of large submerged structures.

Prof. Tao Du (Tsinghua University)

Talk Title: Computational Biomimetic Design

Tao Du is an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences (IIIS) at Tsinghua University. He obtained his Ph.D. from the Computer Graphics Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His primary research interests lie in Computational Design and Physical Simulation. His work has been published in top-tier journals and conferences in computer graphics and machine learning, with notable contributions highlighted by prominent technology media outlets such as WIRED and MIT News. For more information, please visit his academic homepage at https://people.iiis.tsinghua.edu.cn/~taodu/.

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