Bram Vanderborght is a professor at the Robotics and Multibody Mechanics Research Group of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. He did a research stay at AIST, Japan, was a postdoc at IIT, Italy, and was a research director at UBB, Romania. He had an ERC Starting Grant and coordinates the EU FET project SHERO on self-healing soft robots and EU Marie Currie ITN SMART on smart self-responsive materials for soft robots. His research interests include cognitive and physical human robot interaction, robot-assisted therapy, humanoids, assistive robotics, and cobots with the core technology of using variable impedance actuators and self-healing actuators.