Consortium

Dr. Lucia Beccai, Ph.D., is Tenured Senior Researcher at IIT, leader of Soft BioRobotics Perception (SBRP) research line, and until 2009 was Assistant Professor in Biomedical Engineering at the Biorobotics Institute of Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Italy. She collaborated and had scientific responsibility in many international projects at European and intercontinental level. Her research belongs to both biorobotics and soft robotics fields with the final aim of achieving soft sensing and perceptive soft robotic solutions for intelligent and safe interaction with the environment and humans. Specific topics include multimodal tactile systems inspired by natural mechanotransduction, soft robotic systems for active and passive touch, milli- and micro-scale fabrication technologies for 3D active structures, soft versatile grasping, and manipulation, and wearable soft sensing. She serves as Associate Editor for some journals including Scientific Reports and Frontiers in Robotics and AI, IEEE RA-L, is a reviewer for many journals (including Science Robotics, Nature Communications), the European Commission (including ERC programme), and some national research agencies (including US NSF). She authored more than 100 articles on refereed international journals, books, and international conference proceedings. 

Barbara Mazzolai is a biologist with a PhD in microsystems engineering. She is Director of the Center for Micro-BioRobotics (CMBR) of the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT), and Principal Investigator of the Bioinspired Soft Robotics Research Line. From 2012 to 2015 she was the Coordinator of the EU-funded FET-Open PLANTOID project (FP7-293431), and currently she is the Coordinator of the EU-funded FET-Proactive GrowBot Project (H2020- 824074). Her research activity is in the field of biologically-inspired robotics and soft robotics, combining biology and engineering for advancing technological innovation and scientific knowledge. In particular, she focuses her investigations on plants and invertebrate animals. On these topics, she has published more than 270 scientific works and the book “La Natura Geniale” (ed. Longanesi).

Prof. Shlomo Magdassi is a professor of chemistry, at the Casali Center for Applied Chemistry, Institute of Chemistry and the Center for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. He is currently the head of the Functional and 3D printing center at The Hebrew University. His research focuses on formation, formulation and applications of micro and nanoparticles. These particles are used as active components in delivery systems, such as in pharmaceutics, and in functional inks, such as conductive inks for printed electronics, 2D, 3D  and 4D printing. He is the author of about 300 publications (among them 4 in Nature family and one in Science family), about 20 chapters in books (H index = 52 ), and the editor of 4 books, two of them ate on printing and inks, including 3D. In addition to his scientific publications, he also has over 80 inventions (39 granted US patents, overall about 300 world wide applications) , which led to several products in the market.

Dr. Drinkwater is Research and Development Chemist at Photocentric Ltd. He is responsible for the development of functional photopolymer resins, for UV and daylight wavelength printers. He received his Masters degree in Chemistry in 2019 from QMUL and joined Photocentric shortly afterward. Since then, he have had the pleasure of developing a variety of application-specific 3D materials to expand our portfolio and meet our customer’s needs. His current focus and area of interest lies in creating a group of high performance 3D-printable elastomers, with properties ranging from hard rubber-like to soft PDMS-like materials.