Emmanuel B. Vander Poorten (Member, IEEE) is currently a Professor with the Faculty of Engineering Technology, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium, where he has coordinated the activities of the Robot-Assisted Surgery (RAS) Group since 2010. He received the degree in mechanical engineering from KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium, in 2000, and the doctoral degree in engineering from Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan, in 2007. He has participated in and coordinated a large number of European Union-funded collaborative research projects on surgical robotics. His research interests include medical device design, robotic comanipulation, haptics, teleoperation, control of flexible instruments, and robotic catheters. He has maintained a close collaboration with UZ Leuven, the university hospital of Leuven, throughout his career and has conducted, in close collaboration with the hospital, several clinical trials with in-house developed surgical robotic technology, including world first interventions on robot-assisted retinal vein cannulation and wave-division-multiplier-based FBG shape sensing inside the pancreatic duct. While interacting with the tech transfer office of KU Leuven, he works to translate the developed technology to the market.