Herman van der Kooij
Prof. Dr. ir. Herman van der Kooij, chairs the BioMechatronics group. He received his Phd with honours (cum laude) in 2000 and is professor in Biomechatronics and Rehabilitation Technology at the Department of Biomechanical Engineering at the University of Twente (0.8 fte), and Delft University of Technology (0.2fte), the Netherlands. His expertise and interests are in the field of human balance and motor control, adaptation, and learning. He combines experiments with neuro-mechanical models. His group designed various rehabilitation, wearable robots, diagnostic, and assistive robotics. Examples are the gait rehabilitation robot LOPES and the Mindwalker wearable exoskeleton. He has published over 170 peer-reviewed publications in the area of biomechatronics and human motor control. He is frequently invited as (keynote) speaker at international conferences. He received several award, among were the prestigious Dutch VIDI and VICI personnel grants for excellent researchers in 2001 and 2015 respectively. He is associate editor of IEEE TBME and IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, member of IEEE EMBS technical committee of Biorobotics and of the advisory board of the IEEE conference BIOROB, chair of the IEEE BIOROB2018 conference, and was member of numerous scientific program committees in the field of rehabilitation robotics, bio robotics, and assistive devices. He participated in seven EU projects and was the coordinator of the European FP7 project Symbitron. Currently he leads the Dutch national program Wearable Robotics and the Dutch national 4TU Soft Robotics program.