Virginia Ruiz Garate

Dr. Virginia Ruiz Garate serves as a Visiting Professor in the Department of Engineering, Design and Mathematics within the Faculty of Environment and Technology at the University of the West of England (UWE), while concurrently holding a Lecturer and Researcher position at Mondragon University. At UWE, she coordinates the Robotics Programme Cluster for Open Day, Offer Holder Day, and Induction events, and represents the Engineering, Design and Mathematics department in the FET RKE Research Culture Working Group.

Education

• PhD in Robotics (Control of lower limb exoskeletons), Universite Catholique de Louvain (UCL), Belgium, 2016

Research Interests
Dr. Ruiz Garate's research spans robotics with emphasis on assistive and rehabilitation applications. Her expertise includes bio-inspired control systems for robotic grasping and manipulation, adaptive controllers for assistive robots, and human-robot collaboration. She investigates tele-impedance frameworks for multi-robot systems and develops specialized controllers for robot hands and kinematics to enhance user interaction in assisted living environments.

Scientific Awards
No specific awards, fellowships, or medals were mentioned in the provided text.

Advising and Grants
Dr. Ruiz Garate led the MSc module in Assistive Robotics and co-leads the Robotics Engineering And Computing for Healthcare (REACH) research group. Her research has been funded through major European Union projects: CYBERLEGs (during her PhD on exoskeleton control), SOMA (developing bio-inspired grasping for robotic hands at IIT), and SOPHIA (multi-robot tele-impedance control frameworks). She has co-organized influential workshops at RSS 2019 and I-RIM 2020 conferences.

Labs and Teams
Currently conducting research at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory (BRL) on adaptive controllers for assistive robots, she previously worked for four years at the Human-Robot Interfaces and Physical Interaction (HRII) laboratory of the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT) in Genoa, Italy.