Plenary Speakers
Chwee Teck Lim
NUSS Chair Professor and Director of the Institute for Health Innovation and Technology
Professor Chwee Teck Lim is the NUSS Chair Professor and Director of the Institute for Health Innovation and Technology at the National University of Singapore. His research interests are in human disease mechanobiology and in developing medical and wearable technologies for disease diagnosis and precision therapy and bringing them from the laboratory to the bedside. He has coauthored over 500 journal publications and cofounded six startups with one public listed in 2018. Prof Lim and his team have garnered over 120 research awards and honors including being elected fellow of nine academies including the UK Royal Society, Nature Lifetime Achievement Award for Mentoring in Science, ASEAN Outstanding Engineering Achievement Award, Asian Scientists 100, Wall Street Journal Asian Innovation Award and the President’s Technology Award.
Melissa Knothe Tate
Founding Director of the Blue Mountains World Interdisciplinary Innovation Institute
Professor Melissa Knothe Tate is the Founding Director of the Blue Mountains World Interdisciplinary Innovation Institute. She is a global thought leader in cross-disciplinary and healthcare innovation. Her R&D program is epitomized by its cross-cutting nature, where the fundamental laws of mechanics are applied to bio-logical/medical systems to elucidate and emulate emergent and smart properties. Knothe Tate is the recipient of more than 40 honours/awards including Engineers Australia Most Innovative Engineers, the Christopher Columbus Foundation – U.S. Chamber of Commerce Chairman’s Distinguished Life Sciences Award, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Senior Research Fellowship, and ETH Zurich’s Dipl. Ing. Georg Fischer Prize 1998 for most outstanding dissertation, across all departments of the university. She holds three U.S. patents and ten EU patents that have been licensed to three companies. She is the founder of a consulting company and three startup companies. She has published over 125 articles and peer-reviewed conference proceedings, one book, and eight book chapters, and serves on the editorial boards of journals such as Current Opinion in Biomedical Engineering. Knothe Tate is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, Biomedical Engineering Society, the American Institute of Medical and Biomedical Engineering, the National Academy of Inventors, and Engineers Australia. Her R&D team has been supported through over $21M in international, national, regional, foundational and industry grants.
Benedicte Vanwanseele
Professor and the head of the Human Movement Biomechanics research group at the Department of Movement Sciences, KU Leuven.
Prof. Vanwanseele is a full professor and the head of the Human Movement Biomechanics research group at the Department of Movement Sciences, KU Leuven. She is also the director of the Leuven Institute of Sports Science. She is an international recognized expert in muscle and tendon biomechanics covering highly specialized biomechanical modelling techniques including musculoskeletal modelling and finite element modelling, with medical imaging. She has published more than 100 full papers in peer-reviewed international journal, attracted research grants, supervised 15 PhD students to completion and is currently supervising 10 PhD students. She has presented her research at several national and international conferences.
Prof. Vanwanseele focuses her research on developing insights and innovative methodologies to achieve personalized rehabilitation and training regimes to enable each of us to perform optimally. Prof. Vanwanseele is also involved in the implementation of evidence-based methods to improve training programs for elite athletes such as the Belgian national hockey team and is the co-founder of a Spin-off company RunEasi.
Thor Besier
Professor at the Auckland Bioengineering Institute
Thor is a Professor at the Auckland Bioengineering Institute and has a joint appointment with the Department of Engineering Science & Biomedical Engineering at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Thor’s research combines medical imaging with computational modelling to understand mechanisms of musculoskeletal injury and disease. Current projects focus on technology to assist people with neurological disorders and the use of models and wearable sensors in orthopaedics. He has published 156 journal papers on these topics and spun-out two companies from his research, including IMeasureU (inertial sensing for human movement) and FormusLabs (orthopaedic pre-operative planning).
Keynote Speakers
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