Profile

Barbara Mazzolai is Director of the Center for Micro-BioRobotics (CMBR) of the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT), and Principal Investigator of the Bioinspired Soft Robotics Research Line.
Her research activity is primary in the fields of biologically-inspired robotics and soft robotics, combining biology and engineering for advancing technological innovation and scientific knowledge.
She graduated in Biology at the University of Pisa, Italy, in 1995 (MSc with Honours). From 1994 to 1998 she worked at the Institute of Biophysics of the National Research Council (CNR) in Pisa and in 2011 she obtained the Ph.D. in Microsystems Engineering from the University of Rome Tor Vergata. She was Research Assistant (1999-2004) and then Assistant Professor in Biomedical Engineering (2004-2009) at Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna. In November 2009, she moved to IIT CMBR as Team Leader. From 2011 she is the Director of the CMBR, and since 2013 the Principal Investigator of research line on Bioinspired Soft Robotics. From 2012 to 2017 she was Deputy Director for the Supervision and Organization of the IIT Centers Network.
In 2017, she was Visiting Faculty at Imperial College London (UK), Aerial Robotics Lab. She is member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (Tübingen and Stuttgart, Germany, since 2016) and member of the Advisory Committee of the Cluster on Living Adaptive and Energy-autonomous Materials Systems - livMatS (Freiburg, Germany, since 2019). From 2012 to 2015 she was the Coordinator of the EU-funded FET-Open PLANTOID project (FP7-293431), for the design of innovative artefacts inspired by plant roots sensing, actuation, and intelligence for environmental exploration and monitoring, and developed the world-first plant-inspired robot, “Plantoid”. Since January 2019, she is the Coordinator of the EU-funded FET-Proactive GrowBot Project (H2020- 824074), which aims at the development of self-growing robots inspired by climbing plants. For her scientific vision and results, Dr. Mazzolai has received prestigious awards, including the Marisa Bellisario Award in 2010, for her scientific and management activities in the EU-funded DustBot project for improving the urban hygiene and the quality of life of citizens; the Medal of the Senate of the Italian Republic in 2013, for her scientific activities in biomimetics and biorobotics; the nomination by RoboHub among the 25 most influential women in robotics in 2015; the Fondazione Carla Fendi Award in 2019, for the design and development of the first plant-inspired robot able to imitate the behaviour of natural roots.