A/Prof Elizabeth Clarke  - From Kangaroos to Robots: pathways to impact through biomechanics 

A/Prof Elizabeth Clarke is Director of the Biomechanics Laboratory at the Kolling Institute, University of Sydney. She has backgrounds in Biomedical Engineering and Science and was awarded her PhD in Biomechanics in 2008. Her diverse research program spans injury biomechanics, tissue engineering, and tissue mechanics, with a focus on mechanisms, repair, and regeneration of soft tissue injuries and disease. She collaborates extensively with orthopaedic surgeons and Industry for translation and innovation through Biomechanics. She severed continuously on the ANZSB Executive Committee from 2009-2018, and has served on the International Society for Biomechanics Executive Council since 2017 - currently President-Elect. Her presentation will be an overview, from her experience, of the many and varied pathways to "impact through biomechanics"; ranging from commercialisation of basic research on kangaroo tendons to create an orthopaedic xenograft, through to robotic simulation of human movement for collaboration and translation with industry.

A/Prof Clarke's presentation is proudly supported by funding from the International Society of Biomechanics

Prof Dario Farina 

Prof Dario Farina received Ph.D. degrees in automatic control and computer science and in electronics and communications engineering from the Ecole Centrale de Nantes, Nantes, France, and Politecnico di Torino, Italy, in 2001 and 2002, respectively, and an Honorary Doctorate degree in Medicine from Aalborg University, Denmark, in 2018. He is currently Full Professor and Chair in Neurorehabilitation Engineering at the Department of Bioengineering of Imperial College London, UK. He has previously been Full Professor at Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark, (until 2010) and at the University Medical Center Göttingen, Georg-August University, Germany, where he founded and directed the Department of Neurorehabilitation Systems (2010-2016). Among other awards, he has been the recipient of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society Early Career Achievement Award (2010), The Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award (2016), and has been elected Distinguished Lecturer IEEE (2014). His research focuses on biomedical signal processing, neurorehabilitation technology, and neural control of movement. Professor Farina has been the President of the International Society of Electrophysiology and Kinesiology (ISEK) (2012-2014) and is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the official Journal of this Society, the Journal of Electromyography and Kinesiology. He is also currently an Editor for Science Advances, IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, IEEE Transactions on Medical Robotics and Bionics, Wearable Technologies, the Journal of Physiology, and IEEE Reviews in Biomedical Engineering. Professor Farina has been elected Fellow IEEE, AIMBE, ISEK, EAMBES.

Dr Michelle Hall - Understanding mechanisms to optimise treatment effects for osteoarthritis

Dr Michelle Hall is a Senior Research Fellow and NHMRC Emerging Leader Fellow in the Centre for Health, Exercise and Sports Medicine, University of Melbourne. Michelle graduated from the University of Melbourne with a PhD (2015) and completed the Global Clinical Scholars Research Training program at Harvard Medical School (2016). Michelle is an emerging leader in the field of hip and knee osteoarthritis, with a particular interest in exercise and adjunct treatments. She leads a multidisciplinary research program to optimise the therapeutic effects of exercise using clinical trials with embedded mechanistic investigations. She has attracted $>5million in research funding from industry and the National Health Medical Research Council. Michelle has received awards for research excellence and engagement including Young Tall Poppy Award (2019) and is two-time runner-up of the Clinical Biomechanics Award (2013, 2018). Michelle is a proud co-founder of the nationwide Biomechanics Research & Innovation Challenge - providing 100 girls from high-schools the opportunity to engage with biomechanics in a supportive environment facilitated by early career female biomechanists.

Dr Jeffrey Bischoff

Dr. Jeffrey Bischoff is Research Director (Biomechanics) at Zimmer Biomet, where he has been since 2006. Previously, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 2001 with a specialization in soft tissue biomechanics, held a post-doctoral position at the Bioengineering Institute at the University of Auckland, and served as Assistant Professor at the University of South Carolina in Mechanical Engineering. In his current role at Zimmer Biomet, he and his research team provide biomechanical support for a wide variety of development and research projects connected with musculoskeletal health. This work has contributed to the launch and clinical success of arthroplasty systems for multiple major joints. Jeff is currently Chair of the ASME VVUQ40 Subcommittee (Verification, Validation, and Uncertainty Quantification in Computational Modeling of Medical Devices), and Chair of the Implants Section of the Orthopaedic Research Society (ORS). He was named Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 2022. Jeff is a tireless advocate for the responsible expansion of the footprint of computational modeling throughout the total product life cycle of medical devices.

Dr Luca Modenese - Personalised neuro-musculoskeletal modelling: from image-based models to motoneuron-driven simulations

Luca Modenese graduated cum laude in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Padova (Italy) and was awarded a PhD in biomechanics from Imperial College London (UK) in 2013. After that he worked as postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Musculoskeletal Research (Griffith University, Australia) and INSIGNEO Institute for in silico Medicine (University of Sheffield, UK). In 2013, he was a visiting scholar at the Neuromuscular Biomechanics Lab at Stanford University. In 2017, Luca was awarded a prestigious Imperial College Research Fellowship in computational biomechanics and since 2022 he is a Scientia Senior Lecturer in the Graduate School of Biomedical Engineering of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. Luca has published more than 45 publications and is a strong advocate of open science: he maintains several open-source projects through his GitHub account, including the popular "awesome-biomechanics" public list of resources.