Sandro Mussa-Ivaldi

Sandro Mussa-Ivaldi is Professor of Physiology, Professor of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, and Professor of Biomedical Engineering in the McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern University. He serves as Senior Research Scientist at Shirley Ryan AbilityLab, where he founded and directs the Robotics Lab. Mussa-Ivaldi received a Laurea in Physics from the University of Torino in 1978 and a PhD in Biomedical Engineering from the Politecnico di Milano between 1986 and 1988. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1987 to 1988. Throughout his career, he has held positions advancing research in sensory-motor systems, including principal research scientist roles prior to his professorship at Northwestern.

His research focuses on robotics, neurobiology of the sensory-motor system, and computational neuroscience. Key areas include bi-directional brain-machine interfaces, body-machine interfaces for controlling assistive devices, computational primitives for sensory-motor learning, motor adaptation to arm dynamics changes, representation of time in the sensory-motor system, and force control. Notable achievements encompass the first measurement of human arm multi-joint impedance, development of force field techniques to study motor learning mechanisms, discovery of functional modules in the spinal cord generating force-fields, the first neuro-robotic system where a lamprey brainstem controlled a mobile robot in closed-loop interaction, and body-machine interfaces allowing individuals with cervical spinal cord injury to operate powered wheelchairs and computers using residual body movements. Mussa-Ivaldi co-authored the book Biological Learning and Control: How the Brain Builds Representations of the World (MIT Press, 2012) with Reza Shadmehr. Highly cited publications include Adaptive representation of dynamics during learning of a motor task (Journal of Neuroscience, 1994), Neural, mechanical, and geometric factors subserving arm posture in humans (Journal of Neuroscience, 1985), Computations underlying the execution of movement: a biological perspective (Science, 1991), Convergent force fields organized in the frog's spinal cord (Journal of Neuroscience, 1993), and Motor learning by field approximation (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 1996). His contributions have profoundly influenced motor control, computational neuroscience, and rehabilitation engineering.