Bio
Cecilia Laschi is Full Professor at the BioRobotics Institute of Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna in Pisa, Italy, currently on leave. She is Provost's Chair Professor at the National University of Singapore, in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. 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 soft robotics, a young research area that she pioneered and contributed to develop at international level, including its applications in marine robotics and in the biomedical field. She has been working in humanoid robotics and neurorobotics, at the merge of neuroscience and robotics.
She is in the Editorial Boards of several international journals, like Science Robotics. She serves as reviewer for many journals, including Nature and Science, for the European Commission, including the ERC programme, and for many national research agencies.
She is IEEE Fellow and member of the Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS) and of the Robotics & Automation Society (RAS), where she served as elected AdCom member and Co-Chair of the TC on Soft Robotics. She founded and served as General Chair for the IEEE-RAS First International Conference on Soft Robotics in Livorno, in 2018.
She has been founding member of RoboTech srl, spin-off company of the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, in the sector of edutainment robotics.