Portrait of assistant professor Francesco Chinello

1. Why did you choose to work at the Department of Business Development and Technology?
I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Italian Institute of Technology, in Genova, Italy. I got to know about the open position at Aarhus University, BTECH on the web, and I decided to apply because I would like to use part of the technical aspects I found in my past research in my new position as assistant professor.

2.       What is your area of expertise and what will you be doing here?
My research is based on developing wearable devices to provide cutaneous stimuli to users. Such stimuli has been part of research activities involving neuroscience applications to discover novel relationships between the stimuli provided and the perception received by the users. It will be interesting and stimulating to merge business and managing studies with control application theories. In my past, I have seen how automation and control background can be used to realise specific principles in other categories like, for example, system biology where mathematical models describe the evolution of bacteria, viruses, species and so on. Economics is similar to Robotics: it is a huge field where any single element could be seen as a system, and I would like to present this vision to the students but also use it into my future research papers.

3.       What is your educational background? And what have you done before?
I lived in Siena and worked for four years at the Siena Robotic Laboratory, under the supervision of professor Domenico Prattichizzo. I moved to Genova five years ago where I started developing wearable devices to control robot and to conduct experiments in external groups. During the summer of 2012, I had the opportunity to work at the Arizona State University at the School of Biological Health and System Engineering establishing a good cooperation (still under development) with the professors Marco Santello and Daisuke Shibata (University of New Mexico).

5.       Please tell us a bit about yourself, your family and your leisure activities.
My father, mother and my girlfriend, who compose my family, are just getting used to seeing me arrive at home and leaving again to new places where I can discuss research activities or I can present new works for conferences. I find it really exciting to travel for work with specific targets and I like new experiences. It is also true that it is not always easy to be away from home, and I miss my family, but I am sure that working in Europe is a big advantage since I can see my family even just for few days.
Now I am starting this new exciting experience in such a beautiful country, as Denmark, and I will try to do my best to honor my role in the Aarhus University group.