Sandro Mussa-Ivaldi was born in Torino (Italy). He graduated in physics from the University of Torino with a thesis on the oculo-motor system. In 1987 he obtained a PhD in biomedical engineering from the Politecnico of Milano. In 1982 he moved to the United States, to work at MIT in the laboratory of Emilio Bizzi in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. Although he planned to stay there for a brief training period, he left 11 years later to take a faculty position in Chicago at Northwestern University, where he is currently Professor of Physiology, Physical medicine and Rehabilitation and Biomedical Engineering. He joined the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago and founded the Robotics Laboratory, dedicated to the study of human motor learning and to the rehabilitation after stroke and spinal cord injury through the interaction with intelligent machines. His areas of interest and expertise include robotics, neurobiology of the sensory-motor system, motor learning and computational neuroscience.