Serena Ivaldi

Serena Ivaldi is a robotics researcher specializing in human-robot interaction.

Life and work Born in Italy, Ivaldi's interest in robots began when she read the science fiction books of Isaac Asimov. She earned her master's degree in automatic control and robotics at the University of Genoa, before completing her PhD at the Robotics, Brain and Cognitive Science Lab of the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia also in Genoa. In 2011, she left Italy for Paris to start her first post-doc at the Institute of Intelligent Systems and Robotics at the Pierre and Marie-Curie University, which became the Sorbonne University in 2017.

In May 2014, Ivaldi joined the IAS group at Darmstadt University of Technology in Germany for a second post-doc in the CoDyCo project. In November 2014, she became a research fellow at the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation in Nancy, France. She then joined the LARSEN project in 2014 at 34 years of age, as a specialist in human-robot interaction. Laevo exoskeletons were tested by 60 caregivers and then used with patients; other experiments were completed for other hospital applications. This was the first known use of exoskeletons in a hospital intensive care unit.

Honors and awards Ivaldi received the Suzanne Zivi Award in 2020 for research excellence.