I combine soft and smart materials with adaptive design and intelligence-driven strategies to create robotic systems that can sense, decide, and physically adapt to the complex demands of healthcare.

Julie Legrand’s research addresses medical challenges through robotics by developing adaptive robotic systems for minimally invasive interventions and advanced tissue engineering.

Her work explores how robotic bodies, materials, sensing, and control can be designed together to create medical technologies that are physically compliant, shape-adaptive, and capable of intelligent interaction with biological environments.

Rather than relying on conventional rigid robotic architectures, Legrand investigates how embedding adaptability directly into robotic structures and materials enables multifunctional behavior, reconfigurability, and context-aware operation.

Her research combines soft and smart materials with innovative structural, modeling, and assembly strategies to develop continuum and soft robotic systems with tunable mechanical properties and adaptable morphologies. She also integrates multi-modal perception and decision-making approaches that allow robotic systems to better interpret and respond to dynamic clinical environments.

To achieve this, Legrand leads multidisciplinary collaborations with clinicians, biomedical engineers, and materials scientists. 

Julie Legrand obtained her degree in Electromechanical Engineering at the Université Catholique de Louvain-La-Neuve in 2017. She then completed a PhD at KU Leuven on robotic, flexible instruments for minimally invasive surgery, supported by the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) in 2021. Afterwards, she joined the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) as a postdoctoral researcher in soft robotics, funded by an FWO junior postdoctoral fellowship. Since 2023, she has been an assistant professor in the Robotics group.