Berenice Mettler

Bérénice Mettler has played tennis recreationally since her childhood in Switzerland, where she developed a lifelong fascination with human movement and the challenges of using technology to reproduce those skills. In 1997 she came to the US to pursue her PhD in Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, and after completing post-doctoral research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she started the Interactive Guidance and Control Lab at the University of Minnesota where she was a tenured faculty from 2006-2017. Her research there focused simultaneously on autonomous flight and gaining insight into how human pilots acquire their unique capabilities. 

Bérénice first got to know the Bay Area over the course of several summers, working at NASA Ames in Mountain View, in connection with her PhD program. In 2011, in addition to her aerospace research, she conducted some of the earliest studies incorporating motion sensors onto a tennis racket. Shortly after, she launched iCueMotion(iCueMotion.com) with the goal of building technology to help people learn movement skills more efficiently, combining wearable sensors, miniaturized computers, and machine learning. In 2016 she went on academic sabbatical to focus on the company, and in 2018 she and her team delivered the initial prototype of the CueMate tennis training system(https://tennis.cuemate.com/