Editorial Board Member

Biography

Gurvinder Singh Virk (PhD, DIC, BSc, CEng, FIET, FCIBSE, CMath, FIMA, SMIEEE) is Chief Scientist at Harbin Institute of Technology Robot International Innovation Research Institute, Huzhou, China where he is assisting and developing initiatives in advanced robotic engineering and commercialisation for medical and non- medical sectors in the Zhejiang region. Professor Virk was Dean at UPES University and has recently stepped down from this role and taken on a Distinguished Professor role in the School of Engineering, UPES University, Uttarakhand, India. His role is to organise strategic engineering projects to develop advanced engineering topics at the university and link to international projects. The School of Engineering is structured into 5 clusters, namely Electrical, Energy, Mechanical, Sustainability and Applied Sciences and comprises around 200 faculty staff providing BTech, BSc, MTech, MSc and PhD programs to around 2,000 students. He is also Managing Director of Endoenergy Systems focussed on developing wearable assistive exoskeletons in medical and non-medical applications involving close human-robot interactions having bases in UK and in India already and plans to expand to China. He is leading technical developments to take the core technology and knowhow created in R&D projects in Europe to develop the commercially viable technology needed to realise the initial wearable exoskeleton products for consumer and medical markets in Europe and Asia. Duties include technical and non-technical other day-today responsibilities for targeted technology development, formulating new proposals, product development and creating and pursuing new business opportunities. He also sits on the Advisory Board of Straightwalk Innovation Fund in exoskeletons. Prof Virk has been an academic for most of his career but changed to exploring business opportunities by joining InnotecUK, Cambridge, UK in 2016 as Technical Director to help advance commercialisation aspects specifically for the company as well as for new service robot applications such as wearable exoskeletons. In this new role he used his academic and previous commercialisation experience to carry out targeted R&D for solving a variety of technical challenges in the running research projects as well as how the innovations realised could lead to commercial climbing robot products for non-destructive testing scenarios. He led a team of ≈15 engineers with specialist skills in mechanical, electrical & electronics and computing & software engineering to work on over 20 R&D and commercialisation projects.