Michele Ghilardi became the third of James Busfield's PhD students to pass his PhD already in 2020. Michele completed his PhD viva on the 16th March defending a thesis entitled, "Soft smart machines: electrically tuneable devices made of electro-responsive elastomeric smart materials." Michele was also significantly supported by Prof Federico Carpi from the University of Florence throughout the project. The project was funded as part of the EU MICACT Horizon 2020 network that collaborated with 11 other EU research centres working on electroactive polymer actuators. The examiners commented on the, "very high quality of the work" and in particular praised the "ultrafast responsive optics" which was considered to be "state of the art". Michele has carried on working in the robotics field and is now a Robot Production Engineer working for Automata.