Gianantonio Magnani received a Master of Science degree in Electronic Engineering from the Politecnico di Milano in 1978. From 1978 to mid 1984 he worked with the Automatica Research Center of the Italian Electricity Board (ENEL), where he contributed to research on modelling, simulation and control of electric power plants. From 1984 to 1985 he took part to the software development of a boiler direct digital control system and of a seismic event detector and localizer, with SDI Spa (Milan), and to the Tethered satellite check-out system, with Laben (Milan). From 1986 to 1992 he was in charge of research and development units and led several projects for industrial and space robotics applications in Fiar (now Selex Galileo), an aerospace avionics company, Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Division, and with Tecnospazio, a Fiar and Comau (Fiat Group) joint company. Since 1992 he has been an Associate Professor and then a Professor of Automatic Control and Robotics at Politecnico di Milano. He has been in charge of research projects awarded by industrial companies and research agencies. His current research interests concern robot position and force control, servomechanisms and mechatronics. He is a Senior Member of IEEE, a member of the Technical Committee on Mechatronics of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC), and a co-chair of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (http://www.ieee-ras.org/) Membership Admission and Retention Standing Committee. He is an associate editor of the IFAC Journals Mechatronics (http://www.ees.elsevier.com/mech/) and Control Engineering Practice (http://www.ees.elsevier.com/conengprac/). From 2006 to 2008 he was the deputy-Chair of, the Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione, Politecnico di Milano, and since January 2009 he has been the Chair of the same department.