Cecilia Laschi is Provost’s Chair Professor of robotics at the National University of Singapore, leading the Soft Robotics Lab. She is Co-Director of CARTIN – Centre for Advanced Robotics Technology and Innovation. She is a member of the University Research Committee (URC) Expert Panel and responsible for the Robotics specialization and the MSc in Robotics.
She is on leave from Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Italy, The BioRobotics Institute. She received her Master in Computer Science from the University of Pisa (Italy), a PhD in Robotics from the University of Genoa (Italy) and a Honorary Doctorate from the University of Southern Denmark, Odense, in 2023.
Cecilia Laschi is best-known for her research in soft robotics, an area that she pioneered and contributed to develop at international level. She investigates fundamental challenges for building robots with soft materials, with a bioinspired approach which started with a study of the octopus as a model for robotics. She explores marine applications of soft robots and their use in the biomedical field, with a focus on eldercare. She has worked in humanoid and neuro-robotics, applying brain models in humanoid robots.
Cecilia Laschi is Editor-in-Chief of Bioinspiration & Biomimetics and Specialty Chief Editor of Soft Robotics in Frontiers in Robotics & AI. She is Editorial Board member of Science Robotics, IEEE Robotics & Automation Letters (RA-L), International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR), and the Intelligent Robotics and Autonomous Agents (IRAA) Series of MIT Press.
She is IEEE Fellow and member of other scientific societies, like AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science), I-RIM (Italian Institute of Intelligent Machines) and GNB (Italian National Group of Bioengineering). In the IEEE, she is member of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS) and of the IEEE Robotics & Automation Society (RAS), where she was elected twice as AdCom member and co-founded the Technical Committee (TC) on Soft Robotics. She founded and chaired the 1st IEEE-RAS International Conference on Soft Robotics (RoboSoft) in 2018, serving now in its Steering Committee. She was Co-Chair of Gordon Research Conference in Robotics 2024 and Program Chair of the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Systems – IROS 2024.
She co-founded the spin-off company RoboTech s.r.l., in edutainment robotics.
Currently, our research on enabling technologies includes sensors and actuators inspired by biological principles. Experimental applications include medical soft robots, and specifically assistive soft arms for eldercare, as well as robots for monitoring the marine ecosystem. This research relies on multidisciplinary expertise in mechanical design, fabrication technologies, modelling and control.
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