Heike Vallery received her Dipl.-Ing. degree in Mechanical Engineering (with honors) from RWTH Aachen University in 2004. Since then, she has been working on robot-assisted rehabilitation and prosthetic legs, in close collaboration with clinical partners and experts in neuroscience and biomechanics. She received her Dr.-Ing. from the Technische Universität München in 2009. From 2008 to 2011, she worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the SMS Lab at ETH Zürich. At that time, she and her collaborators started realizing diverse transparent robotic interfaces for 3D overground gait training, which are now enabling ground-breaking research on recovery after spinal cord injury. From 2011 to 2012, she worked at Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi as an assistant professor, and she joined TU Delft in 2012 in that same function.
Today, as a full professor at TU Delft, she works on minimalistic and unconventional concepts to support human gait and balance, such as a balance-assisting backpack with gyroscopic actuation. Since November 2019, she also holds a honorary professorship at the Department for Rehabilitation Medicine at Erasmus MC in Rotterdam.
Heike Vallery has published more than 70 peer-reviewed publications, filed 11 patent applications, and received diverse fellowships and awards, such as the 1st prize of the euRobotics Technology Transfer Award 2014 and a Vidi fellowship in 2016 from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research.