Majid Taghavi joined Imperial in August 2021 to establish his interdisciplinary research group on Soft Robotic Transducers at the Department of Bioengineering. He aims to deliver the new generation of soft multifunctional actuators, sensors, and energy harvesting technologies, enabling monolithic soft robots for health applications.

Prior to this, Majid was a postdoctoral researcher in SoftLab, university of Bristol, where he introduced multiple artificial muscle technologies. For example, he developed a new class of electric actuators with a gigantic force amplification, the highest contraction among any actuation technologies (> 99.8%), and a power density equivalent to human muscle. Majid was awarded his PhD in BioRobotics from Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna with the highest honor, receiving the Italian Institute of Technology scholarship, where he developed various electromechanical and bioelectrochemical energy harvesting and self-powered sensing technologies.