Femke van Beek is a postdoc at the Dynamics and Control department within the Mechanical Engineering Faculty at Eindhoven University of Technology. She has completed a BSc and MSc in Biology at Wageningen University. From there, she moved on to a PhD position with Astrid Kappers at Utrecht University and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. In this project, which was embedded in the STW Perspectief program H-haptics, she worked on understanding haptic perception for designing intuitive haptic guidance and feedback for tele-operation systems. Then, she moved to Seattle to work at Facebook Reality Labs (the former Oculus Research) to investigate multimodal feedback for novel haptic interaction systems for VR and AR applications, in which soft robotics played a big role.

In her current work, she will continue to focus on using knowledge about the sensory-motor system to design intuitive interactions with soft robotic (tele-operated) systems. She will also try to find ways to use soft robots to provide haptic feedback to the user.