Our New MaD-Woman – Prof. Dr. Anne Koelewijn

Anne joined the MaD lab in August as an assistant professor. She has a D.Eng. in mechanical engineering from Cleveland State University, and an MSc in mechanical engineering and a BSc in aerospace engineering, both from TU Delft. After starting out in aerospace engineering, she quickly shifted focus to robotics and biomechanics, because these fields have a more direct impact and improve other people’s lives. Her research interest are in sports and gait biomechanics. She aims to use (neuro)musculoskeletal simulations to understand human gait, and suggest improvements, for example using assistive devices (e.g. orthoses, prostheses).

Previously, Anne did a postdoc at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, where she studied the effect of different neural pathways on standing balance and gait using neuromuscular simulations. Before that, she received a doctoral degree from Cleveland State University, where she used predictive gait simulations to better understand the choice of movement patterns in gait. Also, she applied these simulations to analyse gait adaptations of persons with a lower-leg amputation. For her MSc thesis, she combined reinforcement learning with different machine learning approaches to create a controller for a robotic arm.