Draft:Syn Schmitt

Syn Schmitt (born June 13, 1975) is a German physicist. He is full professor for Computational Biophysics and Biorobotics (CBB) at the University of Stuttgart and director of the Institute for Modelling and Simulation of Biomechanical Systems (IMSB) since 2018.

Life
Syn Schmitt was born in Leonberg and grew up in Weil der Stadt. After middle school (Realschule), he took vocational training as electronics technician at IBM in Sindelfingen and attended Technische Oberstufe (highschool) in Stuttgart afterwards. He studied physics (Diplom/M.Sc.) and physics and physical education (Staatsexamen/M.Ed.) at the University of Stuttgart and obtained his PhD in theoretical physics at the University of Tübingen in 2006 supervised by Hanns Ruder. From 2009 to 2012 he was first junior research group leader and then from 2012 to 2018 junior professor at the University of Stuttgart, associated with the Cluster of Excellence SimTech. Since 2016 he is Fellow of the Stuttgart Center of Simulation Science. Since 2018 he has been Full Professor for Computational Biophysics and Biorobotics at the University of Stuttgart. Since 2019 he has been Adjunct Professor in the School of Mechanical, Medical and Process Engineering of the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia and Faculty member of the International Max Planck Research School for Intelligent Systems (IMPRS-IS) at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Cyber Valley Stuttgart Tübingen. From 2017 to 2022 he was member of the Senate's Committee for Gender and Diversity. Since 2019 he serves as member of the Committee for Responsibility in Research. In 2019 he co-founded the Institute for Modelling and Simulation of Biomechanical Systems at the University of Stuttgart together with his colleague Oliver Röhrle and serves as its director since then. Since 2023, he serves as speaker of the newly founded inter-university center Bionic Intelligence Tübingen Stuttgart (BITS).

Research
In his research, he is interested in autonomous muscle-driven motion. His group works towards a better understanding of natural intelligent systems and to learn artificial intelligent systems to generate motion like natural, biological systems. His group develops new methods to model and simulate coupled biological systems, for example, digital human models. This includes biophysical interaction with the environment, somatosensory motor control, and computational neuroscience. One key research question is morphological intelligence, that is, "How does the biological morphology help in perceiving, acting and sensing for motion generation and control which otherwise would have to be done by the brain (nervous system)?". In that respect, understanding the biophysics of motion could be seen as a window into the nervous system to enhance our understanding of natural intelligence. On the technical side, the group strives to define new concepts for building biomimetic, artificial motion systems. This includes, in particular, muscle-driven robotic systems. The lessons learned from biology are applied not only in the virtual world but also to build real physical models, i. e., artificial intelligent machines.

Outreach activities
Since 2013, he is member of the Kepler society (Kepler Gesellschaft e.V.).

His research lead to an expert testimony in the so-called 'bathtub murder case' which ended with an acquittal of Manfred Genditzky, after 13 and a half years in prison.

Selected publications

 * Nadine Badie and Syn Schmitt. "Enhancing stance robustness and jump height in bipedal muscle-actuated systems: a bioinspired morphological development approach". In: Bioinspiration & Biomimetics 19.3 (2024), p. 036012.
 * Silvia Gubi-Kelm, Lennart May, Syn Schmitt, Christian Bitzigeio, Regina Rick, and Klaus Pü "Interdisziplinäre Betrachtung eines Mordes, den es nicht gab - der Fall Manfred G." In: Archiv für Kriminologie 253.1/2 (2024), pp. 30–75.
 * Elsa K. Bunz, Daniel F. B. Haeufle, C. David Remy, and Syn Schmitt. "Bioinspired preactivation reflex increases robustness of walking on rough terrain". In: Scientific Reports 13.1 (2023), p. 13219.
 * Maria Hammer, Tizian Wenzel, Gabriele Santin, Laura Meszaros-Beller, Judith Paige Little, Bernard Haasdonk, and Syn Schmitt. "A new method to design energy-conserving surrogate models for the coupled, nonlinear responses of intervertebral discs". In: Biome- chanics and Modeling in Mechanobiology 23 (2024), pp. 757–780.
 * Pierre Schumacher, Daniel F.B. Haeufle, Dieter Büchler, Syn Schmitt, and Georg Martius. "DEP-RL: Embodied Exploration for Reinforcement Learning in Overactu- ated and Musculoskeletal Systems". In: Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR). 2023.
 * Laura Meszaros-Beller, Maria Hammer, Julia M. Riede, Peter Pivonka, J. Paige Little, and Syn Schmitt. "Effects of geometric individualisation of a human spine model on load sharing: neuro-musculoskeletal simulation reveals significant differences in ligament and muscle contribution". In: Biomechanics and Modeling in Mechanobiology 22.2 (2023), pp. 669–694. ISSN: 1617-7940.
 * Lennart V. Nölle, Atul Mishra, Oleksandr V. Martynenko, and Syn Schmitt. "Eval- uation of muscle strain injury severity in active human body models". In: Journal of the Mechanical Behavior of Biomedical Materials 135 (2022), p. 105463.
 * Ghazi-Zahedi, J. Rieffel, S. Schmitt, and H. Hauser. "Editorial: Recent Trends in Morphological Computation". In: Frontiers in Robotics and AI 8 (2021), p. 159.
 * Günther, R. Rockenfeller, T. Weihmann, D. F. B. Haeufle, S. Schmitt, and T. Götz. "Rules of nature's Formula Run: Muscle mechanics during late stance is the key to explaining maximum running speed". In: Journal of Theoretical Biology 523 (2021), p. 110714.
 * R. Walter, M. Günther, D.F.B. Haeufle, and S. Schmitt."A geometry- and muscle-based control architecture for synthesising biological movement". In: Biological Cybernetics (2021). ISSN: 1432-0770.
 * Driess, H. Zimmermann, S. Wolfen, D. Suissa, D. Haeufle, D. Hennes, M. Toussaint, and S. Schmitt. "Learning to Control Redundant Musculoskeletal Systems with Neural Networks and SQP: Exploiting Muscle Properties". In: 2018 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). 2018, pp. 6461–6468.
 * Michael Günther, Daniel F.B. Haeufle, and Syn Schmitt. "The basic mechanical structure of the skeletal muscle machinery: One model for linking microscopic and macro- scopic scales". In: Journal ofTheoretical Biology 456 (2018).
 * F. B. Haeufle, M. Günther, G. Wunner, and S. Schmitt. "Quantifying control effort of biological and technical movements: An information-entropy-based approach". In: Physical Review E 89 (1 2014), p. 012716.
 * S Schmitt, D F B Haeufle, R Blickhan, and M Gü"Nature as an engineer: one simple concept of a bio-inspired functional artificial muscle". In: Bioinspiration & Biomimetics 7.3 (2012), 036022 (9pp).
 * S Schmitt and M Gü "Human leg impact: energy dissipation of wobbling masses". In: Archive of Applied Mechanics 81.7 (2011), pp. 887–897.
 * Michael Günther, Syn Schmitt, and Veit Wank. "High-frequency oscillations as a consequence of neglected serial damping in Hill-type muscle models". In: Biological Cy- bernetics 97.1 (2007), pp. 63–79.

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