Alumni Lecture “Building Better Exoskeletons”
Feb. 20, 2015, 18:30 - 21:00
Mumbai, India
Venue: Ave 29 - South Mumbai, 4, Kohinoor Mansion, 29 Hughes Road, Mumbai 400 007 (view map)
Cost: Free (tea, coffee, and snacks will be provided)
Space is limited. Please register by sending an email to .
Join fellow alumni and friends for a special seminar with Dr. Minerva Pillai ’07, M.S. ’10, Ph.D. ’14, Co-Founder of US Bionics, a company building robotic exoskeletons for medical and therapeutic applications.
Artificial exoskeletons are ubiquitous in movies, books, and in pop culture, but the reality is that the technology is still in its infancy. Her talk “Building Better Exoskeletons” will explore current exoskeleton technologies in the medical field focusing on gait assisting systems for individuals with paraplegia, as well as industrial and military exoskeletons, and passive and active exoskeleton systems in terms of energetics and intelligence.
She will be preceded by Fulbright scholar and RSID alumna Catherine Leigh Schmidt, who will speak about her research in Devnagiri script.
Speaker Profile:
Dr. Minerva Pillai received her B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently a post-doctoral researcher at the Human Engineering and Robotics Laboratory at UC Berkeley. She is also a co-founder of US Bionics, a company that commercializes exoskeleton technologies developed at Berkeley. Dr. Pillai is the lead principal investigator for a small business grant funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). The project involves developing and investigating exoskeleton technologies to reduce back injuries in workers. She has designed and developed exoskeleton systems for able bodied individuals to reduce stress on the knee joint during squatting activities. Dr. Pillai has also been involved in the development of knees for medical exoskeleton systems to enable paraplegics to walk. A very notable personal and professional accomplishment of hers has been to help an undergraduate student at Berkeley, Austin Whitney, an individual with spinal cord injury, walk across the stage for graduation to accept his diploma. Her work was featured in numerous media and news outlets including CBS, ABC, and CNN. Dr. Pillai continues to strive to improve the field of wearable robotics with her current and future work.