Havazelet Bianco-Peled, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel
Prof. Havazelet Bianco-Peled is an expert in the area of biomedical polymers. She has received several awards for her professional accomplishments, published more than 70 research papers, edited a book, and has ten patent applications either granted or pending. Bianco-Peled is the founder, CSO and former BOD member of SEAlantis Ltd., a company that develops, manufactures and commercializes novel biomimetic tissue adhesives base on a technology invented in her lab. Her current research interests include: nano-materials for biomedical applications, tissue adhesives and biosynthetic scaffolds for tissue engineering; drug delivery; mucoadhesion; physical characterization of biological, biomedical and biomimetic nano-systems.
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