Assistant Professor
BioRobotics Institute
Leonardo Cappello
Bio
Leonardo Cappello is an Assistant Professor at the BioRobotics Institute of Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna (Italy), where he founded the Textile Robotics Laboratory within the Artificial Hands Area. His research focuses on textile-based robotic wearables for human sensorimotor restoration and augmentation, bridging robotics, haptics, and motor neuroscience.
He earned a BS in Mechanical Engineering (2009) and an MS in Biomedical Engineering (2011) from the University of Florence, followed by a PhD in Robotics, Cognition and Interaction Technologies at the Italian Institute of Technology (2016). During his doctoral studies, he was a visiting researcher at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.
Leonardo conducted postdoctoral research at Harvard University and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, working on soft wearable robots for upper-limb sensorimotor restoration, and later at the BioRobotics Institute, where he advanced robotic prostheses and prosthetic technologies for the upper extremities.
He is the recipient of a European Research Council Starting Grant for the project MUsculoSkeletal Expansion (MUSE) and received the Best Student Paper Award at the IEEE International Conference on Rehabilitation Robotics (ICORR) in 2015.