These are the biographies of some of our accepted speakers.  Not all our speakers are listed here.

Ann Blandford, University College London, London, United Kingdom

Ann Blandford is Professor of Human–Computer Interaction at University College London and Director of the UCL Institute of Digital Health. She is an expert on the design and use of interactive technology in healthcare delivery, and particularly on how to design systems that fit well in their context of use and for their intended purposes. She is Principal Investigator on an NIHR grant, ECLIPSE, studying infusion pump design. She has published widely on the design and situated use of interactive health technologies, and on how technology can be designed to better support people’s needs.

Luigi La Barbera, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy

Luigi La Barbera received his Ph.D. Degree in Bioengineering in 2015 at Politecnico di Milano with a dissertation entitled “Preclinical evaluation of posterior spinal fixators – Critical assessment of the current international standards and proposal for improvement”. He is currently employed as a Postdoc Researcher in the Laboratory of Biological Structure Mechanics of Politecnico di Milano. His research activities range within the orthopaedic field, being particularly focused on the preclinical evaluation and design of orthopaedic and spinal implants both using experimental tests and validated finite element models.

Manuele Gori, Universita’ Campus Bio-Medico di Roma, Rome, Italy

Dr. Manuele Gori is a cellular and molecular biologist (MS in Biological Sciences in 2004, University of Rome Tor Vergata) with a solid background in the germline, pluripotent stem cell biology, and hepatology area.

2008: PhD in Sciences and Biotechnologies of Reproduction and Development (University of Rome Tor Vergata).

2008-2010: Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Irvine (USA).

2010-2011: Research Fellow in Molecular and Cellular Cardiology (University of Rome Tor Vergata).

2011-2013: Postdoctoral Fellow in the Laboratory of Molecular Virology and Oncology (Francesco Balsano Foundation, Rome, Italy).

2013-present: PI in the Laboratory of Tissue Engineering (Universitá Campus Bio-Medico di Roma, Rome, Italy).

Research interests: microfluidics and 3D printing for studying liver pathophysiology, and the immune system/tumor interaction.

Hauert Roland, Empa, Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, Dübendorf, Switzerland

Dr. Roland Hauert studied Physics at the ETH in Zürich, Switzerland. Thereafter, he worked as a Ph.D. student at the University of Basel in the research group of Prof. P. Oelhafen, where he completed his thesis on electron spectroscopy. After one year as a postdoctoral fellow at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, USA, he joined 1988 the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (EMPA) in Switzerland. There he is working on diamond-like carbon (DLC) coatings for biological and tribological applications, interface analysis and especially the long term adhesion in biological media.

Yan Huang, Brunel University London, London, United Kingdom

Dr Yan Huang is a Senior Lecture in the Institute of Materials and manufacturing, Brunel Univeristy London. Prior to this, Dr Huang worked for Confae Technology Ltd, UK, as a Technical Director from 2004 to 2010 and for The University of Manchester as a Research Fellow from 1996 to 2004. He has extensive research experience in light alloys and metal matrix composites, with particular interest in their structural and biomedical applications.

Rashed Karim, King’s College London, London, United Kingdom

Dr. Rashed Karim is a Research fellow at King’s College London and Honorary lecturer at Imperial College London. At King’s his work primarily focuses on image analysis for MR images with applications in cardiac electrophysiology. He has authored over 50 papers in peer-reviewed journals, conference proceedings and abstracts. He completed a BSc in Computer science from the University of Toronto, an MSc with distinction from Queen Mary, University of London and a PhD in image segmentation from Imperial College London.

Elisa Mele, Department of Materials, Loughborough University, Loughborough, United Kingdom

Dr Mele is currently Senior Lecturer in Biomaterials at the Department of Materials of Loughborough University. Her research interests include: Biocompatible and natural polymers for regenerative medicine; Nanofibrous wound dressings with antimicrobial activity and enhanced cell proliferation; Functional nanocomposites with controlled superficial and mechanical properties; Microfluidic devices for biological assays and food safety; Nanofabrication approaches for polymers.

María José Rupérez Moreno, Universitat Politècnica de València, Valencia, Spain

María José is assistant professor at the Department of Mechanical and Material Engineering of the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) since September 2015. Previously, she occupied a similar position at the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Construction of the University Jaume I for eight months. María José has a Bachelor Degree (Honors) in Physics.  She started to work at the Inter-University Research Institute for Bioengineering and Human Centered Technology of the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) in 2005 as researcher, where she was working for nine years. There, she got her PhD in Mechanical and Material Engineering. Then, she started to lead the line of research Deformable Models for Computer Assisted Surgery. In this line of research, she led the part related with Computational Biomehanics. More specifically, the part related to modeling the biomechanical behavior of the soft tissues. In these last years, María José’s group has made real improvements implementing software tools to assist radiologists during diagnosis and biopsies of suspicious masses in the breast and in the liver. They have also made improvements in the planing of the intrastromal ring implantation in corneas of patients with keratoconus. Using evolutionary computation María José’s group has developed a methodology to in vivo estimate the elastic constants of the constitutive models of the organs, which has been successfully applied to the liver, the breast, the cornea, and more recently, to the aorta.

Cristina Manuela Peixoto Santos, University of Minho, Guimarães, Portugal

Cristina P Santos is an Assistant Professor at UMinho, and a researcher at CAR/ALGORITMI. Her work focuses the study of human locomotion and its neuro-rehabilitation by means of bio-inspired robotics and neuroscience technologies. Her research seeks to advance the sciences of biomechanics, neuro-physiology and applications of ICT to design of diagnostic and therapeutic strategies to improve gait recovery processes. She has also been supervising rehabilitation related works with smart walkers and synergies in exoskeletons and cycling in stroke and Parkinson patients. She has been scientific responsible of locomotion national projects and participated in some European Robotic projects. She supervises 2 PhD and 7 MSc thesis in the project topics. She is a member of the program committee of international conferences on robotics. She has more than 100 in international journals and proceedings of SCOPUS/ISI international scientific conference in these areas. She also has collaborations with rehabilitation enterprises, coordinates QREN projects and a direct involvement with end-user groups, in Braga Hospital, that will ensure that actual user needs are addressed by the prototype platforms.

Jérôme Schmid, Geneva School of Health Sciences, University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland, HES-SO Genève, Genève, Switzerland

Prof. Schmid is a professor at the Geneva School of Health Sciences in the department of Medical Radiology Technology.

He graduated in 2003 from the French Engineering school ENSIMAG and received in 2011 a PhD from the University of Geneva, Switzerland. With a team of co-workers, he was awarded the 1st medical prize of the 2009 Eurographics conference — promoting the use of computer-graphics for medicine.

At the research institutes of IRCAD France and the Prince of Wales Hospital in Hong Kong, Prof. Schmid investigated robotics and image processing for minimally invasive surgical applications.

His research interests include computer vision and medical image analysis for computer-assisted diagnosis and intervention.

Maria Tenje, uppsala university, UPPSALA, Sweden

Dr. Tenje leads the research group EMBLA located at Uppsala University and Lund University. Main research activities are focused on microfluidics with a special focus on droplet microfluidics for biomedical applications. Dr. Tenje’s group has shown that it is possible to control particles inside droplets without physically contacting them, which is a major step forwards in the development of minaturised systems for medical screening and analysis at high throughput.

Ben Zhong TANG, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technolog, Kowloon, Hong Kong

Ben Zhong Tang received BS and PhD degrees from South China University of Technology and Kyoto University, respectively. He conducted postdoctoral research at University of Toronto. He joined Department of Chemistry at the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology as an assistant professor in 1994 and was promoted to chair professor in 2008. He was elected to the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2009.

He has published 700 papers. His work has been cited over 20,000 times, with an h-index of 86. He has been listed by Thomson Reuters as a Highly Cited Researcher in the categories of Chemistry and Materials Science. He has opened up a new area of research on aggregation-induced emission, which was ranked as one of the Top 100 Research Fronts by Thomson Reuters in 2013. He received a State Natural Science Award from Chinese Government in 2007. He is currently serving as Editor of Advances in Polymer Science (Springer) and Associate Editor of Polymer Chemistry (RSC) and sitting in the international advisory boards of a dozen other journals

Andrea Acquaviva, Politecnico di Torino, Turin, Italy

Arash Arami, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom

Arash Arami is a research associate at Human Robotics Group, bioenegineering department, Imperial College London since 2015. He was a postdoctoral researcher at Laboratory of Movement Analysis and Measurement at EPFL from 2014 to 2015. His main research is in human motor control, neural prostheses, data-driven inferences, and intelligent assistive and rehabilitative devices. His PhD research was focused on design of smart knee prostheses. His current research is focused on modelling of human neuromechanics, instrumented tests to evaluate motor functions, cooperative control of exoskeletons, and data-driven algorithms for activity classification during activity of daily life and interactive exercise games.

Oleg Aslanidi, King’s College London, St Thomas’ Hospital, London, United Kingdom

Dr Oleg Aslanidi is a Senior Lecturer at King’s College London. His main research interests are in computational modelling of the heart and cardiac arrhythmias, as well as imaging modalities that enable the reconstruction of the 3D heart structure in health and disease. Despite a vast amount of clinical data from patients and cell to organ level experiments, complex arrhythmogenic mechanisms in the entire heart remain unclear. Computational modelling provides a framework for integrating multimodal imaging and experimental data in-silico. Validated computational tools can be applied for dissecting patient-specific arrhythmia mechanisms and predicting optimal treatments, and thus assist in clinical decision-making.

François A. Auger, Faculty of Medicine of Université Laval, Québec City, Canada

Giuseppe Battaglia, University College London, London, United Kingdom

Giovanni Biglino, UCL Institute of Cardiovascular Science & Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, London, United Kingdom

James Brown, National University of Ireland Galway, Galway, Ireland

Maria Monica Castillo-Ortega, Universidad de Sonora, Sonora, Mexico

Luis J. Fernandez, University of Zaragoza, Zaragoza, Spain

Jöns Hilborn, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden

Chia-Hsien Hsu, National Health Research Institutes, Taiwan, China

Mark MacLachlan, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C., Canada

Mark MacLachlan obtained his Ph.D. degree from the University of Toronto (1999) in the areas of inorganic polymers and materials. After a postdoc at M.I.T., he returned to UBC to begin his independent career in 2001; he was promoted to Professor in 2011. Mark’s research interests span supramolecular chemistry, macrocycle chemistry, nanomaterials, mesoporous materials, photonic structures, and biopolymers. He has received a Humboldt Fellowship and the Steacie Prize. Mark is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Director of the Nanomaterials Science & Technology Training Program (NanoMat) at UBC, and holds the Canada Research Chair in Supramolecular Materials.

Abhishek Mahajan, King’s College London, London, United Kingdom

Davide Moscatelli, Politecnico di Milano, Milano, Italy

Krishna Pramanik, National Institute of Technology, Rourkela, Rourkela, India

Gurunath Ramanathan, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, Kanpur, India

António Manuel A M Ramos, University of Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal

Adrian Ranga, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

Professor Santosh Bothe MCA Department, IMED, Bharati Vidyapeeth University, Pune

Afzal Shah, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

Rebecca Shipley, University College London, London, United Kingdom

Denise Paschoal Soares, Universidade do Porto, Laboratório de Biomecânica do Desporto, Porto, Portugal

Atefeh Solouk, Amirkabir University of Technology, Tehran, Iran

Nicolas Szita, University College London, London, United Kingdom

Michael Thompson, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Ewaryst Tkacz, Silesian University of Technology, Zabrze, Poland

Luca Urbani, UCL Institute of Child Health, London, United Kingdom

Claire Wilhelm, University Paris Diderot, Paris, France

Claire Wilhelm, engineer and physicist, has oriented her research to the biomedical field since obtaining her PhD in 2002 in soft matter physics. Her works during this last decade lied at the crossroads of magnetism, biophysics and nanomedicine and were resolutely multidisciplinary, taking advantage of the physical properties of magnetic nanoparticles to develop more effective treatments and new methods of medical investigation. She was appointed CNRS research director in 2013, she received the CNRS bronze medal in 2011, the Louis Ancel prize in 2014, and she is currently the grantee of an ERC consolidator. She has co-authored 120+ publications (5300 citations, h-index 38) and delivered 50+ invited lectures.

Matthew Williams, Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, London, United Kingdom

Henggui  Zhang, The University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom

Yunhua Luo, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

Mehmet R. Dokmeci, Harvard Medical School Cambridge, MA, United States 

Mehmet R. Dokmeci received his B.S. (with distinction) and M.S. degrees from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis and his Ph.D. degree from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, all in Electrical Engineering. Dr. Dokmeci is currently an Instructor at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School. Previously he has worked at Northeastern University and Corning-Intellisense Corporation developing nanosensors, biomedical microsystems, and optical MEMS-based products. He has extensively published in refereed journals and conferences in the areas of BioMEMS, medical devices, biomaterials, and sensors. He is the author of 105 technical journal articles and 112 conference publications.

Chair Persons

Janine Post, MIRA institute for biomedical technology and technical medicine, University of Twente, Enschede, Netherlands

Janine Post completed her PhD on signaling events regulating embryonic development and cancer at Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada. As a postdoc at the prestigious Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Germany she developed novel biophysical techniques for the visualization of protein dynamics in living embryos and cells. Currently she works in the department of Developmental BioEngineering at the University of Twente, The Netherlands. Janine’s research is aimed toward understanding the mechanisms regulating cartilage hypertrophy and degenerative cartilage diseases. For this she employs a variety of molecular biology, biochemical and biophysical techniques in combination with computational modeling.