Organizers

Sukho Song is a group leader at the Laboratory of Sustainability Robotics at Empa (Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology) in Switzerland and a visiting researcher at the Aerial Robotics Laboratory at Imperial College London in the UK.  Previously, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Reconfigurable Robotics Laboratory and the Laboratory for Soft Bioelectronic Interfaces at EPFL. He also spent his postdoctoral tenure in the Soft Robotics and Bionics Laboratory at Seoul National University (SNU), South Korea. He obtained his Ph.D. in the department of mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, USA in 2017. During his studies, he was also a research associate in the Physical Intelligence Department at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Germany.  He received his undergraduate degree in Aeronautics and Space Engineering and master's degree in Nanomechanics at Tohoku University, Japan in 2005 and 2007, respectively. Dr. Song's research interest is design and manufacturing of multi-scale soft robots that combine microscale features with a larger scale soft robotic architecture for new functionalities.  Application areas of interest include, but not limited, soft bioelectronic interfaces for nervous system, electronics-free control of soft robots, bioinspired soft adhesion, and biohybrid robots.

Jun Shintake is an associate professor at the University of Electro-Communications (UEC), Tokyo, Japan. He received his B.Eng. and M.Eng. in mechanical engineering from UEC, in 2009 and 2011, respectively. He received his Ph.D. in microengineering from Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland, in 2016. After that, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at EPFL. Since 2018 he was working as an assistant professor until 2023 at UEC. His research interests include soft robotics, actuators, and sensors.

Dr. Pham Huy Nguyen is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Laboratory of Sustainability Robotics at Empa, Switzerland and a visiting researcher at the Aerial Robotics Lab at Imperial College London, UK. His research is focused on the development of various novel physically intelligent, bio-inspired aerial robotic platforms that utilize soft sensing and actuation schemes. Previously, he received the B.S.E in Mechatronics from the Asian Institute of Technology in Bangkok, Thailand in 2013 and the M.Sc. degree in Robotics from the EMARO (European Masters in Advanced Robotics) program in 2015. The EMARO program is a two year program, with the first year at École Centrale de Nantes, France, and the second year at Università Degli Studi di Genova, Italy. He received the Ph.D. in Systems Engineering from the Arizona State University, USA, in Fall 2020.