Barkan Ugurlu received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Yokohama National University, Yokohama, Japan, in March 2010. From May 2010 to March 2013, he was a Post-Doctoral Researcher, at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Genova, Italy, and Toyota Technological Institute, Nagoya, Japan. Between March 2013 and February 2015, he was a Research Scientist at the Computational Neuroscience Laboratories, Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (ATR), Kyoto, Japan. He currently holds an Associate Professor position at the Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, Ozyegin University, Istanbul, Turkey. He serves as an Associate Editor for IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics and International Journal of Robotics Research. His research interests include embodied physical intelligence, focusing on continual-learning locomotion controllers that adapt online across domains, human–robot symbiosis frameworks for seamless collaboration in heterogeneous teams, and the unification of machine learning and control theory to enable safe, robust reinforcement learning–based autonomy that integrates perception, control, and interaction in unstructured real-world environments.