Prof. dr. ir. Bram Vanderborght received the degree in the study of Mechanical Engineering at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in 2003 with highest distinction. Since 2003, Bram has been researcher at the VUB, supported by the Fund for Scientific Research Flanders (FWO).

In May 2007, Bram received my PhD in Applied Sciences. The focus of his research was the use of adaptable compliance of pneumatic artificial muscles in the dynamically balanced biped Lucy. In May-June 2006, he performed research on the humanoids robot HRP-2 at the Joint Japanese/French Robotics Laboratory (JRL) in AIST, Tsukuba (Japan) in the research “Dynamically stepping over large obstacles by the humanoid robot HRP-2”. He received a 3-year post-doc grant with mobility grant from the FWO. From October 2007-April 2010, he worked as post-doc researcher at the Italian Institute of Technology in Genova (Italy) on the humanoid robot iCub and compliant actuation.

Since October 2009, Bram has been appointed as professor at the VUB where he teach mechatronics and give a robotics project. From October 2011-Sept 2016, he was research director at the Universitatea Babes-Bolyai, Department of Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy with a project on robot assisted therapy with ASD children and VUB-PI of the DREAM project. Bram received an ERC Starting Grant on Series-Parallel Elastic Actuation for Robotics (SPEAR). He was a member of the Young Academy of the Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts.

Currently, Bram coordinates EU FET SHERO SHERO project and Marie Curie ITN SMART project. He is VUB-PI of EU project SOPHIA . He was till 2020 the core lab manager of Flanders Make in Flexible Assembly, now he is affiliated to the Interuniversity Microelectronics Institute (imec), Belgium, as scientific collaborator. Bram is also member of Brubotics , the mulitdisciplinary research enter on Human robot interaction. He also co-lead the Homo Roboticus project on how to keep the human values central in a robotised world. He was till 2020 the Editor In Chief of IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine, from 2022 I will be Vice President – Electronic Products and Services Board of IEEE-RAS.

His research interests include the use of soft and self healing actuators for cognitive and physical human robot interaction in applications in health and manufacturing. His works are on display in the AI Experience Center .