Dr. Bishakh Bhattacharya is a Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering at IIT Kanpur, India. He served the HAL Chair for the period of Feb 2021 - Jan 2024 and Coordinator, Centre of Excellence - Telemedicine & Robotics, Gangwal School of Medical Sciences and Technology, IIT Kanpur. He served as Member (Senate Nominee) of the Board of Governors (BoG) of IIT Kanpur. He is the former Head of the Design Programme from 2011-2013. He also served as a head of Cognitive Science Programme and coordinated the Space Technology Cell of the Institute. He was a visiting professor at the University of Sheffield, where he researched on Structural Health Monitoring of Complex Autonomous Systems in collaboration with Prof. K. Visakan, Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering. He was also a visiting Professor at IPS-Waseda University, Japan and jointly developed a series of Pipe Health Monitoring robots with Prof. Harutoshi Ogai. As a DST-JSPS recipient, he is working in collaboration with Prof. Hiroaki Wagatsuma of Kyushu Institute of Technology, Japan on a Child Robot Interaction study. He is active in creating Web and Video-based course materials for India’s National Program on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) initiative.