Claire chatted to Maria Elena Giannaccini from the University of Aberdeen about soft and bioinspired robotics for healthcare and beyond.
Maria Elena Giannaccini has a degree in Biomedical Engineering from the Università di Pisa in Italy. She conducted her Master’s thesis at Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna as part of the EU-funded OCTOPUS project. In 2015, she obtained her PhD in Robotics at the Bristol Robotics, where she focussed on developing safe, variable stiffness robotic devices. She worked at the University of Bristol on the soft, bioinspired Tactip sensor and a soft robotics artificial larynx. In 2019, Elena was appointed as a Lecturer in Robotics at the University of Aberdeen where she pioneered research in soft robotics.