Prof. Dr. Robert Riener

Robert Riener is Full Professor for Sensory-Motor Systems at the Department of Health Sciences and Technology (D-HEST), ETH Zurich. He has been Assistant Professor for Rehabilitation Engineering at ETH Zurich since Mai 2003. In June 2006 he was promoted to the rank of an Associate Professor and in June 2010 to the rank of a Full Professor. He is also active as full professor of medicine in the Spinal Cord Injury Center of the Balgrist University Hospital (University of Zurich). From February 2016 till January 2018 Riener was head of D-HEST.

Robert Riener studied mechanical engineering at TU München and University of Maryland, USA, from 1988 till 1993. He received the Dipl.-Ing. degree and the Dr. degree from the TU München in 1993 and 1997, respectively. In 1993 he joined the Institute of Automatic Control Engineering, where he has pursued research into neuroprosthetics. After postdoctoral work at the Centro di Bioingegneria, Politecnico di Milano from 1998 to 1999, he returned to the TU München, where he finished his Habilitation in the field of Biomechatronics about multi-modal VR applied to medicine in January 2003. Since his activity in Zurich Riener develops robots and interaction methods for motor learning in rehabilitation and sports.

His current research interests involve human motion synthesis, biomechanics, virtual reality, man-machine interaction, and rehabilitation robotics. He authored and co-authored more than 400 peer-reviewed journal and conference articles and 24 patents. He is a member of several scientific societies (e.g., IEEE/EMBS, DGBMT/VDE, IFESS) and an associate editor of several scientific journals. For his development of the arm therapy robot ARMin, he was awarded with several prizes including the humanTech Innovation Prize and the Swiss Technology Award. He was awarded also with the IEEE TNSRE Best Paper Award 2010 and the euRobotics Technology Transfer Awards 2011 and 2012. Riener is initiator and organisator of the Cybathlon for which he received the European Excellence Award, the Yahoo Sports Technology Award as well as an honorary doctoral degree of the University of Basel.