Dr Fabrizio Sergi, PhD, has been a part of the Department of Engineering at the University of Delaware since 2015, where he is currently an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering. Dr Sergi has been the recipient of numerous grants from institutions such as the NIH, NSF, and the American Heart Association. Dr Sergi was awarded an ACCEL ShoRe grant in 2025.
Tell us a little about yourself, your research journey, and how you arrived where you are now.
“I am a biomedical engineer and scientist. I am passionate about applying engineering principles to address challenges in the movement sciences and rehabilitation as well as about teaching engineers how to think about solving medical problems in this area. My expertise and main area of research is in rehabilitation robotics. I have been a professor at UD since 2015. Before then, I completed post-doctoral training at Rice University in Houston, TX, after finishing my PhD in biomedical engineering from Università Campus Bio-Medico in Rome, Italy. I started working in the area of rehabilitation robotics during my M.S. thesis, and I got so excited about this field that I continued on to pursue a PhD in the same research group. My PhD and post-doctoral training have formed the basis for developing my research program as a PI at UD, which we now have expanded with the contributions of all collaborators and my students.“
Tell us about your research. What is the area of focus, what are your research goals, and what is the significance of the research?
“My area of focus is rehabilitation robotics. We aim to develop robotic technologies that can integrate into the current practices of neuromotor rehabilitation. Our most recent work has focused on post-stroke rehabilitation, but my research has also addressed other conditions like spinal cord injury. The main challenges that we are addressing are algorithmic (how exactly should these robots be controlled to provide maximum benefits for specific participants), as well as neurological (what neural processes are facilitated/strengthened by movement rehabilitation, provided by a human or robotic therapist?), and we are hoping to connect these two sets of challenges to be able to deliver the best intervention to participants so that they best stimulate the neural reorganization processes that lead to clinically meaningful improvements. The significance of this research is in the possible impact in clinical care, but many of our technologies are also broadly applicable to other domains where robotics and autonomous systems are being developed to closely support human function in daily activities.“
How has the ACCEL program helped with your project (grant writing, mentorship, help accessing funding, etc)?
“The ACCEL program was supportive of my early efforts in using MRI-compatible robotics to measure brain signals associated with fast feedback responses in humans. This would have been considered far-reaching by funding agencies like the NIH in the absence of substantial preliminary data to demonstrate feasibility. The pilot funding mechanism enabled my lab to establish feasibility of a new experimental methodology, and that early support led to several ensuing proposals funded by the NIH and by the NSF. Also, the formalization of a mentorship mechanism for pilot proposals of junior investigators set the stage for productive meetings with my faculty mentor, Dr. Buchanan, who helped me identify a path forward to secure funding and the overall success of that specific line of research.“
What do you hope to be the impact of this research, and what future directions do you see related research going?
“Our team is making discoveries that are helping to identify how secondary motor pathways contribute to motor function in healthy participants. We are now expanding our target to characterize the same physiological mechanism in post-stroke individuals. We are hoping to get more insight as to why we can only make limited sense of why certain participants recover motor function very well after stroke while some other participants don’t. Beyond that, we are planning to extend our experimental techniques to go past the limitations of fMRI, combining fMRI with TMS to better understand what the fMRI measurements indicate about the role of specific pathways to motor function. We hope that this research will contribute to the formulation of future rehabilitation strategies to enhance recovery of motor function after stroke.“
More information regarding Dr. Sergi and his research can be found here on the University’s website.