Manuel Keppler leads the Elastic Robot Control group at the German Aerospace Center’s (DLR) Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics in Germany. His team seeks to advance the foundations of robot control, planning, and design to enable elastic robots to achieve human-like motion performance and efficiency. He further directs the control development for DLR David, a humanoid robot equipped with variable stiffness actuators. Manuel holds a B.S. in Molecular Biology from the University of Vienna (2009), as well as a B.S. (with Distinction, 2012) and an M.S. (with Distinction, 2014) in Mechanical Engineering from the Technical University of Vienna (2012, 2014). He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science (Summa Cum Laude) from the Technical University of Munich. He joined the German Aerospace Center (DLR) as a research scientist in 2014 and since 2019 he is leading a control team. From 2019 to 2020 he was Visiting Researcher at Sapienza University in Rome working with Prof. Alessandro De Luca. Since 2019, Manuel leads a control team and since 2023 his own research group. Manuel’s contributions have been recognized with several awards, including being a finalist for the “Best Paper Award on Automation” at the 2016 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in Stockholm, an Honorable Mention for the “IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters Best Paper Award” in 2023, and winning the George Giralt PhD Award—Europe’s most prestigious recognition for a dissertation in robotics. He is also the co-chair and co-founder of the IEEE Technical Committee on Robot Control.