Cecilia Laschi

Affiliation:


Full Professor
Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna,
Pisa, Italy

Title:

"Soft Robots’ life-like abilities: new vision for robotics and new inspiration for art?"

Biography:

Prof. Cecilia Laschi is Full Professor of Biorobotics at the BioRobotics Institute of the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna in Pisa, Italy, where she serves as Rector’s delegate to Research. She graduated in Computer Science at the University of Pisa in 1993 and received the Ph.D. in Robotics from the University of Genoa in 1998. In 2001-2002 she was JSPS visiting researcher at Waseda University in Tokyo.
Her research interests are in the field of biorobotics and she is currently working on soft robotics, humanoid robotics, and neuro-developmental engineering. She worked in the first projects on neurorobotics and she is now in the NeuroRobotic Platform of the Human Brain Project Flagship. She pioneered soft robotics, as the coordinator of the European ICT-FET OCTOPUS Integrating Project, leading to one of the first soft robots, and she coordinated the European ICT-FET Open Coordination Action on Soft Robotics RoboSoft.
She is Chief Editor of the Specialty Section on Soft Robotics of Frontiers in Robotics and AI and of Frontiers in Bionics and Biomimetics and she is in the Editorial Board of Bioinspiration&Biomimetics, Robotics and Automation Letters, Frontiers in Bionics and Biomimetics, Applied Bionics and Biomechanics, Advanced Robotics.
She is member of the IEEE, of the Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, and of the Robotics & Automation Society, where she served as elected AdCom member and currently is Co-Chair of the TC on Soft Robotics.