Dr Francesco Semeraro is Postdoc within the Human-Robot Interfaces and Interaction (HRI²) Laboratory, under the supervision of Dr Arash Ajoudani. He works in the ergoCub Core project, funded by the Italian National Institute for Insurance against Accidents at Work (INAIL), and carries out research on AI-enabled human-robot collaboration for the reintegration in the workplace after impairments caused by injury.
In 2025, he was Postdoc at The University of Manchester within the Horizon Europe MUSAE project (Ref. 10107421). In 2025, he achieved his PhD Computer Science at The University of Manchester, within the Cognitive Robotics Laboratory, Manchester Centre for Robotics and AI, under the supervision of Prof. Angelo Cangelosi. His research dealt with non-dyadic human-robot collaboration for flexible manufacturing and was sponsored by the UKRI Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council DTP CASE-conversion "Human-Robot Collaboration for Flexible Manufacturing" (Ref. 2480772), in collaboration with BAE Systems plc.
Prior, he got the MSc Robotics and Computation at University College London in 2019, during which he was awarded 1st Prize for the Engineers in Business Competition from Sainsbury Management Fellows for the group project of the "Entrepreneurship: Theory and Practice" module. In 2018, he got the MSc Bionics Engineering with honours at Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna in 2018, during which he was awarded the Vincenzo Tagliasco Prize at the XXXVII edition of the Italian National Bioengineering Group (GNB) School and the 1st Prize as Young Researcher in the IX edition of the Italian Ambient Assisted Living Forum (ForItAAL) for his thesis on affective computing in social interactions, under the supervision of Prof. Filippo Cavallo. In 2015, he got his BSc Electronic Engineering with honours at University of Pisa.
