Volker Dürr studied Biology at the University of Tübingen (Germany), the University of Sussex (UK) and the Max-Planck-Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen (Germany). His PhD was on neurophysiological aspects of visual information processing in insects, conducted at the Australian National University in Canberra (Australia) and at the Dept. of Neurobiology of Bielefeld University (Germany). After that, he was research fellow at Bielefeld University, where he obtained his habilitation and venia legendi in Zoology in 2005. During that time, he focussed on sensory-guided, context-dependent control of motor behaviour (mainly in insects) and neural network modelling of locomotor behaviour. In 2002 he was a fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Berlin. From 2007 to 2009, he led his own research group at the University of Cologne, focusing on active tactile sensing in insects, its role in locomotor control and its implementation in bionics/biorobotics. In 2008, he obtained the venia legendi in Zoology for the University of Cologne. In 2009 he became appointed head of the Dept. of Biological Cybernetics at Bielefeld University. He was the coordinator of the EU project Embodied Motion Intelligence for Autonomous Cognitive roBots (EMICAB, FP7-ICT, 2010-2014) and Principal Investigator of the Cluster of Excellence "Cognitive Interaction Technology" (CITEC, 2009-2019). In his research, Volker Dürr combines methods from Behavioural Physiology (e.g., motion capture and kinematics), Neurophysiology (e.g., extra- and intracellular recording of nervous and muscular activity), biomechanics (e.g., morphological and physical constraints of limbs), and computational modelling (e.g., sensitivity analyses and Artificial Neural Network modelling). The main objective of his research is how animals achieve autonomous, context-dependent control of behaviour through active interaction with their environment.