Biography

Just Herder is a full professor of Interactive Mechanisms and Mechatronics, Chair of the Mechatronic System Design group and Head of Department of Precision and Microsystems Engineering at Delft University of Technology. He has published in international peer-reviewed journals and conferences and has received several international awards. He is an ASME fellow, board member of several international conferences, associate editor of Mechanism and Machine Theory, and Editor-in-Chief of Mechanical Sciences. Seven start-up companies have emerged from his research and he holds over a dozen international patents in different areas of mechanism design. He held visiting positions at Laval University, Canada, and at MIT, USA, as a Fulbright Visiting Scholar.
His interest is in mechatronic systems with remarkable behavior and their applications. In particular he is interested in those mechanisms that effect or are affected in a special way by interaction with their environment, called Interactive Mechanisms. A long term goal is to establish Distributed Mechatronics, where motion, actuation and sensing are distributed along a compliant structure, with a high level of function integration, trending towards small length scales. To reach this goal, we focus on the development of new technology, methods and techniques, such as static balancing, dynamic balancing, compliant mechanisms, parallel kinematics, self-adaptability, distributed actuation and sensing. Applications fields include precision engineering and mechatronics, robotics, rehabilitation engineering, high-tech industry, MEMS.