Manuel Keppler leads the Elastic Robot Control group at the German Aerospace Center (DLR), Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics, in Germany. His research advances the foundations of robot control, planning, and design to enable elastic robots to achieve human-like motion performance, efficiency, and safety. He also directs the control development of DLR David, a humanoid robot equipped with variable-stiffness actuators. Manuel holds dual degrees in mechanical engineering, B.S. (with Distinction, 2012) and M.S. (with Distinction, 2014), from the Technical University of Vienna, as well as a B.S. in Molecular Biology from the University of Vienna (2009). He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science (summa cum laude) from the Technical University of Munich. He joined DLR in 2014 as a research scientist, became control team leader in 2019, and founded his own research group in 2023. From 2019 to 2020, he was a Visiting Researcher at Sapienza University of Rome, collaborating with Prof. Alessandro De Luca. Manuel’s contributions have been recognized with several awards, including the George Giralt PhD Award, Europe’s most prestigious recognition for a doctoral thesis in robotics, the ICRA 2016 Best Paper Award on Automation (Finalist), and an Honorable Mention for the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters Best Paper Award (2023). He is also co-founder and co-chair of the IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Robot Control.