Webinar – Educational Wearable Robots

Speakers

Ebru Kilic-Bebek is an experienced educator and researcher with a history of working in higher education. In 2004, she received her M.A. degree in Curriculum and Instruction from Yildiz Technical University (YTU), Turkey, and in 2009 her Ph.D. degree in Urban Education from Cleveland State University (CSU), USA, with a specialization in Learning and Development. She taught English Language courses at YTU and Teacher Education courses at CSU. As a researcher, she examined factors related to students’ academic achievement and worked in these universities’ student support divisions. Between 2012-2015, she was a researcher working for the Education Reform Initiative in Turkey. In 2015 she started working at Ozyegin University (OzU), managed various teaching and learning projects, established the Learning Office, and delivered seminars and courses. Currently, she is with OzU’s Sectoral Education Program teaching the “Skills Management” and “Learning to Learn” courses. Her research areas are higher education studies, self-regulated learning, discipline-based and interdisciplinary learning, and competency development.

Levi J. Hargrove, PhD, P.Eng, received his MScE and PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of New Brunswick (2005, 2008). He is currently the Director and Scientific Chair of Center for Bionic Medicine at the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab and an Associate Professor in the Departments of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation and the McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern University. His research interests include signal processing, pattern recognition, and control of bionic limbs. A major goal of his research is to develop clinically realizable myoelectric control systems that can be made available to persons with limb loss in the near future. In 2012, Dr. Hargrove co-founded Coapt, a company to commercialize control algorithms for prosthetics and orthotics. His research addresses all levels of amputation and has been published in the Journal of the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine and has resulted in multiple patents. Key projects include the development of advanced and adaptive control systems for prosthetic legs, improving control of robotic hand prostheses, and intramuscular EMG signal processing.  

Volker Bartenbach is CEO of the Swiss industrial exoskeleton company Auxivo AG. Volker received a diploma in engineering in 2010 from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany, after writing his thesis on adaptive knee prostheses. From 2010 to 2012, he was a researcher at the KIT working on humanoid robotics and haptic interfaces. In 2012 Volker joined the Sensory-​Motor Systems Lab at ETH Zurich as a Ph.D. student researching robotic exoskeletons. After his Ph.D. in 2017, he founded Beyond Robotics, a company that successfully commercialized an educational exoskeleton. Also in 2017, he was awarded an ETH Pioneer Fellowship and joined the Rehabilitation Engineering Lab at ETH to work on industrial exoskeletons. In 2019, he was awarded an Innosuisse/SNSF Bridge Fellowship to continue his work on industrial exoskeletons. In late 2019 he became Co-founder and CEO of Auxivo AG where he now continues his work on exoskeletons.