Laura A. Hallock is an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Utah, where her planned work leverages multiple sensing modalities (including ultrasound, surface electromyography, and motion capture) to better evaluate human capability and intent, enabling safer, more intuitive, and more personalized physical human–robot interactions.

Prior to her UofU start in January 2024, she was a Postdoctoral Researcher in the GRASP Lab at the University of Pennsylvania, where she worked to develop human-aware collaborative robot manipulators and rehabilitation robots. Laura received her PhD in EECS from UC Berkeley’s HART Lab, where her graduate thesis pioneered the use of ultrasound-measured muscle deformation as a measure of output force, enabling novel ultrasound-driven models of human arm dynamics applicable to assistive device design, medical diagnostics, and studies of motor control. Previously, she received her SB in EECS from MIT, where she worked on neuromuscular modeling for lower-limb prostheses in the MIT Media Lab’s Biomechatronics Group.

Her previous work can be found here.