Michel Joop van der Schoor is currently working at the VDI Technology Centre in Berlin as a technology advisor with a speciality in product design for circularity and resource efficiency.

He received his M.Sc. degree and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the Technical University of Berlin. In his Ph.D. “Integrating Sustainability in the Design Process of Urban Service Robots” he researched the current role of the three dimensions of sustainability (ecological, social and economic) in the early product development process and suggested a method supporting designers to integrate social and ecological goals into the requirements engineering as well as evaluating their attainment in the early phase of the design process. The method was developed during his project MARBLE (Mobile Autonomous RoBot for Litter Emptying), where a robot prototype was built and tested. Afterwards he joined the Vrije Universiteit of Brussels as a post-doc and was called to be a junior fellow in the 2024 program “Sustainable Robotics” of the Brussels Institute for Advanced Studies (BrIAS). Together with FARI – AI for the Common Good he also led the citizen science project “Robots and the City” uncovering possible use cases for public service robots in the smart city of Brussels before returning to Berlin.