Conor Walsh is the Gordon McKay Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the John A. Paulson Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and a Core Faculty Member at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering.
He is the is the founder of the Harvard Bio-design Lab, which brings together researchers from the engineering, industrial design, apparel, clinical and business communities to develop new disruptive wearable technologies for augmenting and restoring human performance. This research includes new approaches to the design, manufacture and control of wearable robotic devices and characterizing their performance through biomechanical and physiological studies so as to further the scientific understanding of how humans interact with such machines. Example application areas include, enhancing the mobility of healthy individuals, restoring the mobility of patients with gait deficits, assisting those with upper extremity weakness to perform activities of daily living and preventing injuries of workers performing physically strenuous tasks.
His multidisciplinary research spans engineering, biology and medicine and has led to multiple high impact scientific papers. His group’s work is highly translation focused, multiple partnerships with industry, technologies already licensed, and one that is a commercially available medical device in the US and Europe. Conor is also dedicated to training the next generation of engineering innovators through his teaching, as well as outreach efforts through the Soft Robotics Toolkit. Conor received his B.A.I and B.A. degrees in Mechanical and Manufacturing engineering from Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, in 2003, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2006 and 2010.