Juan M. Gandarias is an assistant professor in the Systems Engineering and Automation Department at the University of Malaga, Spain, where he conducts his research in the Robotics and Mechatronics Lab. He is the principal investigator of the STIFF-JAM project and has participated as a senior researcher in several international projects. He has been a senior postdoctoral researcher in the Human-Robot Interfaces and Interaction group at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia. He has participated as a senior postdoc in the European project Ergo-Lean, a Starting Grant Project from the European Research Council (ERC). He also participated as a senior researcher in the SOPHIA, which was framed within the Horizon 2020 initiative of the European Union. He has participated in European, Spanish, and Italian projects as a predoctoral/postdoctoral researcher. He has authored 40 publications in scientific journals and flagship conferences in the fields of robotics, automation, and AI. He is also the inventor of one international patent. He received his B.Sc. in Industrial Engineering and his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Mechatronics Engineering from the University of Málaga in 2015, 2017, and 2020, respectively. He obtained the Cum Laude and international mentions for his Ph.D. degree as well as the extraordinary award for the best doctoral dissertation in Mechatronics Engineering amongst his cohorts. His main research interests include physical human-robot interaction, compliant robots, and haptics.