Saskia Baltrusch

252 Curriculum Vitae Saskia was born, as a twin, on the 14th of March, 1990 in Lüneburg, Germany. After finishing high school in 2009, she went travelling for 9 months in New Zealand and Australia. In 2010 she started studying Sports and Performance at the German Sports University Cologne. During her studies she worked as an assistant at the Institute of Biomechanics and Orthopaedics and discovered her interest in biomechanical analysis. After obtaining her Bachelor of Science in 2014, Saskia was looking for a new challenge and decided to go abroad for her Master studies. She chose the beautiful Netherlands. In 2015 she obtained her Master’s degree in Human Movement Sciences at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Subsequently, she started as a junior researcher at the Rehabilitation Center Heliomare, in January 2016. For four years she was working on her PhD project on the development and evaluation of a passive trunk exoskeleton for low-back pain prevention and vocational re-integration. This project was a collaboration between 8 partners from 5 different countries, including Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Heliomare from the Netherlands. It resulted in multiple publications in international peer-reviewed journals, as well as numerous presentations at national and international conferences. This thesis presents most of her work.