Prof Pietro Valdastri holds a Laurea degree cum Laude in Electronic Engineering from the University of Pisa in 2001 and a PhD degree cum Laude in Biomedical Engineering from Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna (SSSA) in 2006, with Prof Paolo Dario as primary advisor. After the PhD, he served as Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the BioRobotics Institute of SSSA for three years, focusing on implantable medical devices and surgical robotics. In 2011, he moved to Vanderbilt University, where he founded the Science and Technologies Of Robotics in Medicine (STORM) research Lab, which focuses on medical capsule robots for gastrointestinal endoscopy and abdominal surgery. In 2016, he moved to Leeds as Chair of Robotics and Autonomous Systems with a primary appointment in the School of Electronic and Electrical Engineering and a secondary appointment in the School of Mechanical Engineering. He is a Royal Society Wolfson Research Fellow, a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Editor of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, a member of the Technology Committee of the European Association for Endoscopic Surgery (EAES), and a member of the steering committee of the International Society for Medical Innovation and Technology (iSMIT). He co-founded a successful medical start-up (WinMedical, now part of AB Medica), and received several prestigious awards and grants, including the ERC Consolidator Grant with the proposal “NoLiMiTs – Novel Lifesaving Magnetic Tentacles” in 2019, the Wolfson Research Merit Award and the NSF CAREER Award with the proposal “Lifesaving Capsule Robots” in 2015.