About me

Broadly, I’m interested in understanding dynamics in biology, and take a build it to understand it approach using tools from robotics, control, and machine learning.

I’ve recently moved to Cornell in Ithaca, NY!

Before this, I was at Biomimetic Robotics Lab at MIT for three and a half years.
I completed my Bsc and Msc at ETH Zurich, starting in Mechanical Engineering and then specializing in Robotics, Systems and Control. During this time I spent a semester at TU Delft, and finished my master thesis with Auke Ijspeert at BioRob, EPFL, working on how tails can be used in legged locomotion. I spent a couple years in Ishiguro Lab at Tohoku University in Japan before joining the Dynamic Locomotion Group at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (MPI-IS) in Stuttgart, Germany to do my PhD with Alexander Badri-Spröwitz. I finished my PhD in 2020, and spent a year as a postdoc at MPI-IS with Sebastian Trimpe before moving to MIT.

Outside the lab I enjoy free-diving, photography, cooking, music and games, in particular go. If you ever want to discuss things (research-related or not) feel free to drop me an e-mail at: heim.steve-at-gmail.com