Elizabeth Hsiao-Wecksler
Elizabeth T. Hsiao-Wecksler is an American biomechanics researcher who studies how people walk and stay balanced, and she helps design devices to aid gait and posture. She is a professor in the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
She studied mechanical engineering at Cornell University, graduating in 1987, and then worked in Xerox’s desktop printing division. She earned a master’s degree from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1994. She returned to graduate school and earned a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 2000, after working with Stephen Robinovitch at UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley. She did postdoctoral research with James Collins at Boston University and with Lewis Lipsitz and Casey Kerrigan at Harvard Medical School, before joining UIUC as an assistant professor in 2002. She earned tenure in 2009, becoming the department’s first tenured woman, and was promoted to full professor in 2015.
Hsiao-Wecksler co-founded IntelliWheels in 2010, a company focused on geared wheels for wheelchairs, and served as its scientific advisor through 2018. She helped start LGBTQ advocacy groups at Xerox and at the UC Berkeley College of Engineering, and she promotes inclusion and diversity at UIUC.
She is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (2014) and a Fellow of the American Society of Biomechanics (2018). She was president of the American Society of Biomechanics for 2021–2022. The Society of Women Engineers named her a Distinguished Engineering Educator in 2018 for her work with student success, project-based and team-based learning, curriculum improvements, and mentoring.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 23:27 (CET).