List of Speakers

List of speakers scheduled to give talks on April 1-2, 2019:


Name: Zachary L. Bercu, M.D., R.P.V.I.

Affiliation: Emory University Hospital Midtown, USA                                               

Talk Title: Minimally Invasive Image-Guided Procedures (MIIP's): A Primer for Medical Robotics Specialists                                           

Bio: Zachary Bercu, MD RPVI, received his A.B. in Psychology from Harvard University in the interdisciplinary Mind, Brain, and Behavior Program in 2004 and received his M.D. from Emory University School of Medicine in 2009. He completed his residency in Diagnostic Radiology and his fellowship in Vascular and Interventional Radiology at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. He is currently the Clinical Site Director for Interventional Radiology at Emory University Hospital Midtown and is the Assistant Program Director for Interventional Radiology Residency and Fellowship at Emory. He serves on the Steering Committee for the Georgia Center for Medical Robotics (GCMR) and is involved in several collaborative projects between Emory University and the Georgia Institute of Technology. His clinical and research interests include rapid identification and adoption of innovation for clinical and educational impact, innovation education, impact of simulation on procedural competence and excellence, locoregional therapies including selective internal radiotherapy with yttrium-90 and chemoembolization, prostate artery embolization for benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH), transradial interventions, peripheral arterial disease, venous thromboembolism (VTE), and portal hypertension.


Name: Dr. Simon DiMaio

Affiliation: Intuitive Surgical, Inc., USA                                              

Talk Title: Medical Robots—From Bench to Bedside                                 

Bio: Simon DiMaio leads Applied Research projects at Intuitive Surgical, Inc. (Sunnyvale, California), makers of the da Vinci Surgical System – a telerobotic system for minimally-invasive surgery. Simon holds a Ph.D. in robotics and control systems from the University of British Columbia, Canada, where he explored haptics and teleoperation technologies, and then went on to develop some of the very first needle insertion models and novel robotic needle steering methods for medical applications. Prior to moving to Intuitive Surgical, he completed a postdoctoral fellowship and later held an appointment as Instructor of Radiology at the Harvard Medical School, as a member of the Surgical Planning Laboratory (SPL) at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. At the SPL, he developed systems for MRI-compatible medical robots, as well as methods for navigated endoscopy and interventional guidance. In addition to R&D projects at Intuitive, Simon is involved in the development of academic relationships and programs, as well as the exploration of future platforms and applications of robotics and technology in medicine.


Name: Dr. Jaydev P. Desai

Affiliation: Georgia Institute of Technology, USA                                           

Talk Title: Flexible, 3D-printed Robotic Systems for Surgical Interventions                                

Bio: Dr. Jaydev P. Desai is currently a Professor and BME Distinguished Faculty Fellow in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech. He is also the Director of the Georgia Center for Medical Robotics (GCMR) and the Associate Director of the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines (IRIM). He completed his undergraduate studies from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India, in 1993. He received his M.A. in Mathematics in 1997, M.S. and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics in 1995 and 1998 respectively, all from the University of Pennsylvania. He was also a Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. He is a recipient of several NIH R01 grants, NSF CAREER award, and was also the lead inventor on the “Outstanding Invention in Physical Science Category” at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he was formerly employed. He is also the recipient of the Ralph R. Teetor Educational Award. He has been an invited speaker at the National Academy of Sciences “Distinctive Voices” seminar series and was also invited to attend the National Academy of Engineering’s U.S. Frontiers of Engineering Symposium. He has over 160 publications, is the founding Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Medical Robotics Research, and Editor-in-Chief of the Encyclopedia of Medical Robotics. His research interests are primarily in the area of image-guided surgical robotics, rehabilitation robotics, cancer diagnosis at the micro-scale, and endovascular robotics. He is a Fellow of IEEE, ASME and AIMBE.


Name: Antoine Ferreira

Affiliation: INSA Centre Val de Loire, France                                             

Talk Title: Recent Progress in Magnetically Actuated Microrobotics for Endovascular Therapies                             

Bio: Antoine Ferreira received his MS and PhD degrees in electrical and mechanical engineering from University of Franche-Comté, Besançon, France, in 1993 and 1996, respectively. In 1997, he was a Visiting Researcher at the ElectroTechnical Laboratory, Tsukuba, Japan. He is currently a Professor of robotics engineering with Laboratoire PRISME, Institut National des Sciences Appliquées Centre Val de Loire, campus Bourges, France.
His main research interests are focused on the design, modeling and control of micro and nanorobotic systemsfor medical applications, micro-nanomanipulation
systems, biological nanosystems, bio-nanorobotics. He has authored three books on micro- and nanorobotics and more than 250 journal and conference papers, as well as book contributions.


Name: Dr. Ann Majewicz Fey

Affiliation: UT Dallas, USA                                          

Talk Title: From Tool to Assistant: Developing Adaptive Surgical Robots for the Operating Room           

Bio: Ann Majewicz Fey completed B.S. degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Electrical Engineering at the University of St. Thomas, the M.S.E. degree in Mechanical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, and the Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University. Dr. Majewicz Fey joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering as an Assistant Professor in August 2014, where she directs the Human-Enabled Robotic Technology Laboratory. She holds at courtesy appointment in the Department of Surgery at UT Southwestern Medical Center. Her research interests focus on the interface between humans and robotic systems, with an emphasis on improving the delivery of surgical and interventional care, both for the patient and the provider.


Name: Prof. Paolo Fiorini, PhD

Affiliation: University of Verona, Italy                                              

Talk Title: Automation and Autonomy in Robotic Surgery  

Bio: Paolo Fiorini, received the Laurea degree in Electronic Engineering from the University of Padova, (Italy), the MSEE from the University of California at Irvine (USA), and the Ph.D. in ME from UCLA (USA). From 1977 to 1985 he worked for companies in Italy and in the USA developing microprocessor-based controllers for domestic appliances, automotive systems, and hydraulic actuators. From 1985 to 2000, he was with NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, where he worked on autonomous and teleoperated systems for space experiments and exploration. In 2001 returned to Italy to the School of Science of the University of Verona (Italy) where is currently Full Professor of Computer Science, and founded the ALTAIR robotics laboratory to develop innovative robotic systems for space, medicine, and logistics. His activities have been recognized by the Entrepreneurship Award at the European Robotics Forum, the Antonio D’Auria award for robotic aids for disabled people, the IEEE Fellow (2009), and several NASA Technical Awards.


Name: Prof. Arianna Menciassi

Affiliation: Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Italy                                            

Talk Title: Robotics for wireless surgery and targeted therapy

Bio: Arianna Menciassi is Full Professor of Biomedical Robotics at Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna (SSSA, Pisa, Italy) and team leader of the “Surgical Robotics & Allied Technologies” Area at The BioRobotics Institute.

She obtained the Master Degree in Physics (summa cum laude, 1995) at the Pisa University and the PhD in Bioengineering at SSSA (1999). She was Visiting Professor at the Ecole Nationale Superieure de Mecaniques et des Microtechniques of Besancon (France), and at the ISIR Institute at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie, in Paris. 

She has a substantial devotion to training and education, both at SSSA and at the University of Pisa, having served as preceptor to 15 postdoctoral associates, ~ 25 PhD students and ~ 60 master degree recipients.

Her main research interests involve surgical robotics, biomedical robotics, smart solutions for biomedical devices, biomechatronic artificial organs, microsystem technology and micromechatronics, with a special attention to the synergy between robot-assisted therapy and micro-nano-biotechnology-related solutions. She also focuses on magnetically-driven microrobots and microdevices, as well as on biomedical integrated platforms for magnetic navigation and ultrasound-based treatments.

She carries on an important activity of scientific management of several projects, European and extra-European, thus implying many collaborations abroad and an intense research activity.

She is co-author of more than 400 scientific publications and 7 book chapters on biomedical robots/devices and microtechnology. Arianna Menciassi is co-inventor of 81 patents (national and international): 24 patents have been granted in Italy since the year 2004; 27 patents have been granted also abroad. She served until August 2013 in the Editorial Board of the IEEE-ASME Trans. on Mechatronics. She is Member of the Editorial Board for Soft Robotics (since 2012); she is Topic Editor of the International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems (since 2013); she is Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Medical Robotics and Bionics; she is Member of the Editorial Board for the Journal of Medical Robotics Research; she has been recently appointed as Editor of APL Bioengineering and member of the Editorial Board of Scientific Reports.

She is Co-Chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Surgical Robotics, she is in the Steering Committee of the Society for Medical Innovation and Technology and in the Steering Committee of the IEEE Transactions on Nanobioscience.

In the year 2007, she received the Well-tech Award (Milan, Italy) for her researches on endoscopic capsules, and she was awarded by the Tuscany Region with the Gonfalone D’Argento, as one of the best 10 young talents of the region.


Name: Elena De Momi

Affiliation: Politecnico di Milano, Italy                                          

Talk Title: Smart assistance for surgical training and surgical practice  

Bio: Elena De Momi, MSc in Biomedical Engineering in 2002, PhD in Bioengineering in 2006, currently Associate Professor in Electronic Information and Bioengineering Department (DEIB) of Politecnico di Milano. She is co-founder of the Neuroengineering and Medical Robotics Laboratory, in 2008, being responsible of the Medical Robotics section. IEEE Senior Member, she is currently Associate Editor of the Journal of Medical Robotics Research, of the International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems, Frontiers in Robotics and AI and Medical & Biological Engineering & Computing. From 2016 she has been an Associated Editor of IEEE ICRA, IROS and BioRob and she is currently Publication Co-Chair of ICRA 2019. She is responsible for the lab course in Medical Robotics and of the course on Clinical Technology Assessment of the MSc degree in Biom. Eng. at Politecnico di Milano and she serves in the board committee of the PhD course in Bioengineering.
Her academic interests include image-processing, virtual environments, augmented reality and simulators, teleoperation, haptics, medical robotics, human robot interaction. She participated to several EU funded projects in the field of Surgical Robotics (ROBOCAST, ACTIVE and EuRoSurge, where she was PI for partner POLIMI). She is currently PI for POLIMI of the EDEN2020 project, aimed at developing a neurosurgery drug delivery system and of the ATLAS MSCA-ITN-2018-EJD.


Name: Muralidhar Padala Ph.D

Affiliation: Emory University, USA                                              

Talk Title: Experimental platforms for development and validation of cardiovascular robotic systems

Bio: Dr. Muralidhar Padala is an assistant professor in the division of cardiothoracic surgery in the Joseph P. Whitehead Department of Surgery at Emory University. He is the director of the structural heart research laboratory, where his research team develops new technologies and techniques for image guided cardiovascular interventions. He holds a program faculty appointment in the Emory/Georgia Tech joint Department of Biomedical Engineering. He obtained his BS in Mechanical Engineering from Osmania University in India, his PhD in Bioengineering from Georgia Institute of Technology, and completed his research fellowship at Imperial College London.


Name: Dominic Papandria, MD

Affiliation: Emory University, USA                                             

Talk Title: Surgical Robotics - Opportunities and Challenges in General Surgery

Bio: Dominic Papandria is a practicing general surgeon and an Assistant Professor of Surgery at the Emory University of Medicine. He received his MD degree from the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, where he also completed his internship in general surgery. He completed the PGY-2 year of his general surgery residency at Johns Hopkins, after which he completed a pediatric surgery clinical and research fellowship at that institution. He resumed his residency training in general surgery at St. Vincent Hospital in Indianapolis, and then pursued fellowship training in surgical critical care at the Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC, and in minimally invasive surgery at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, OH. During the latter fellowship, he served as a faculty member for Nationwide Children's minimally invasive surgical skills laboratory at several national and international pediatric surgery meetings. He was also appointed clinical assistant professor at Ohio State University College of Medicine. Board certified in general surgery and surgical critical care, Dr. Papandria’s primary clinical role at Emory is as teaching faculty in general and minimally invasive surgery at Emory University Hospital Midtown. He is a practicing robotic surgeon, with his first exposure to surgical robotics platforms occurring in medical school and his first procedures performed as a resident surgeon in 2012.


Name: Dr. Pretesh Patel

Affiliation: Emory University, USA                                          

Talk Title: Anti-Cancer Brachytherapy – Challenges and Opportunities

Bio: Pretesh Patel is Assistant Professor and Director of the Physician Residency Program of Radiation Oncology at the Winship Cancer Institute at Emory University.  He specializes in the care of patients with genitourinary and gastrointestinal malignancies.  Dr. Patel is one of 2 providers at Emory performing high dose rate (HDR) brachytherapy for the treatment of prostate cancer.


Name: Dr. Cameron Riviere

Affiliation: Carnegie Mellon University, USA                                         

Talk Title: Active and passive compensation of physiological motion for accuracy enhancement in surgery

Bio: Cameron Riviere is a Research Professor in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, and Director of the Surgical Mechatronics Laboratory.  He holds a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from The Johns Hopkins University.  Since 1998 he has also been Adjunct Professor in the Department of Rehabilitation Science and Technology at the University of Pittsburgh.  He has been guest editor of special issues on medical robotics in the Proceedings of the IEEE and the Annals of Biomedical Engineering, and is active in the summer schools on medical robotics in North America and Europe.  His research interests include medical robotics, control systems, signal processing, and biomedical applications of human-machine interfaces.


Name: Nabil Simaan, Ph.D.

Affiliation: Vanderbilt University, USA                                          

Talk Title: Towards Continuum Robots with Surgical Situational Awareness: Modeling and Control Challenges with Applications

Bio: Dr. Nabil Simaan received his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the Technion—Israel Institute of Technology, in 2002. His Masters and Ph.D. research focused on the design, synthesis, and singularity analysis of parallel robots for medical applications, stiffness synthesis and modulation for parallel robots with actuation and kinematic redundancies. His graduate advisor was Dr. Moshe Shoham. In 2003, he was a Postdoctoral Research Scientist at Johns Hopkins University National Science Foundation (NSF) Engineering Research Center for Computer- Integrated Surgical Systems and Technology (ERC-CISST), where he focused on minimally invasive robotic assistance in confined spaces under the supervision of Dr. Russell H. Taylor. In
2005, he joined Columbia University, New York, NY, as an Assistant Professor of mechanical engineering and the Director of the Advanced Robotics and Mechanisms Applications (ARMA) Laboratory. In 2009 he received the NSF Career award for young investigators to design new algorithms and robots for safe interaction with the anatomy. In 2010 he joined Vanderbilt University as an Associate Professor and was promoted to the rank of a Professor in 2017. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE. He served as an Editor for IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) (2013-2015), Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Robotics (TRO) (2012-2016), and Area Chair for Robotics Science and Systems (2014, 2015). He currently serves as an editorial board member for Robotica, Corresponding Co-Chair for the IEEE Technical Committee on Surgical Robotics and as an Associate Editor for ASME Journal of Mechanisms and Robotics (2018-2021).


Name: Mahdi Tavakoli, PhD, PEng, MIEEE

Affiliation: University of Alberta, Canada                                      

Talk Title: Robotic Learning and Imitation of Physical Therapy

Bio: Mahdi Tavakoli is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Alberta, Canada. He received his PhD degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Western Ontario, Canada, in 2005. In 2006, he was a post-doctoral researcher at Canadian Surgical Technologies and Advanced Robotics (CSTAR), Canada. In 2007-2008, he was an NSERC Post-Doctoral Fellow at Harvard University, USA. Dr. Tavakoli’s research interests broadly involve the areas of robotics and systems control. Specifically, his research focuses on haptics and teleoperation control, rehabilitation robotics, and image-guided surgery. Dr. Tavakoli is the lead author of Haptics for Teleoperated Surgical Robotic Systems (World Scientific, 2008). He is an Associate Editor for IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics, Journal of Medical Robotics Research, Control Engineering Practice, and Mechatronics. 


Name: Russell H. Taylor. PhD

Affiliation: The Johns Hopkins University, USA                           

Talk Title: A Thirty Year Perspective on Medical Robotics: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

Bio: Russell H. Taylor has over 40 years of professional experience in the fields of computer science, robotics, and computer-integrated interventional medicine.  He received a Bachelor of Engineering Science degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1970 and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1976. He joined IBM Research in 1976, where he developed the AML robot language and managed the Automation Technology Department and (later) the Computer-Assisted Surgery Group before moving in 1995 to Johns Hopkins, where he is the John C. Malone Professor of Computer Science with joint appointments in Mechanical Engineering, Radiology, and Surgery. He is also the Director of the Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics (LCSR) and of the (graduated) NSF Engineering Research Center for Computer-Integrated Surgical Systems and Technology (CISST ERC). Dr. Taylor’s research interests include robotics, human-machine cooperative systems, medical imaging & modeling, and computer-integrated interventional systems. He is Editor-in-Chief Emeritus of The IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation, and has served on numerous other editorial and scientific advisory boards.  In 1994 he was elected as a Fellow of the IEEE “for contributions in the theory and implementation of programmable sensor-based robot systems and their application to surgery and manufacturing”, and he is also a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, of the AIMBE, of the MICCAI Society, and of the Engineering School of the University of Tokyo. He is also a recipient of numerous awards, including 4 IBM Outstanding Achievement Awards; 4 IBM Invention Awards; the Maurice Müller Award for Excellence in Computer-Assisted Orthopaedic Surgery; the IEEE Robotics Pioneer Award; the MICCAI Society Enduring Impact Award; the IEEE EMBS Technical Field Award; and the Honda Prize.


Name: Dr. Zion Tse

Affiliation: University of Georgia, USA                       

Talk Title: MRI-guided Therapy for Prostate, Cardiovascular and Spinal Treatment

Bio: Dr. Zion Tse is an Associate Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Principal Investigator of the Medical Robotics Lab at the University of Georgia. Formerly, he was a research fellow in the Radiology Department at Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He received his PhD in Medical Robotics from Imperial College London, UK. His academic and professional experience has related to mechatronics, medical devices and surgical robotics. Dr. Tse has designed and prototyped a broad range of novel clinical devices, most of which have been tested in animal and human trials.


Name: Jun Ueda, Ph.D.

Affiliation: Georgia Institute of Technology, USA           

Talk Title: Neuromodulations via Robotic Mechanical Stimulation and Paired Brain Stimulation

Bio: Dr. Jun Ueda is currently an Associate Professor and Woodruff Faculty Fellow in the G.W.W. School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. Dr. Ueda received the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees from Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan, in 1994, 1996, and 2002 all in Mechanical Engineering. From 1996 to 2000, he was a Research Engineer at the Advanced Technology Research and Development Center, Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, Japan. He was an Assistant Professor of Nara Institute of
Science and Technology, Japan, from 2002 to 2008. During 2005-2008, he was a visiting scholar and lecturer in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  He joined the G. W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology as an Assistant Professor in 2008. He served as the Director for the Robotics PhD Program at Georgia Tech for 2015-2017. He received a Fanuc FA Robot Foundation Best Paper Award in 2005, IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Early Academic Career Award in 2009, and Advanced Robotics Best Paper Award in 2015. He currently serves as an Associate Editor for the IEEE RAS Robotics and Automation Letters, International Journal of Intelligent Robotics and Applications, and IEEE Transactions on Robotics. He is the author of Cellular Actuators: Modularity and Variability in Muscle-Inspired Actuation, Butterworth-Heinemann, 2017, and Human Modeling for Bio-Inspired Robotics, Academic Press, 2017. He is a member of ASME and a senior member of IEEE.


Name: Tamas Ungi

Affiliation: Queen’s University, Canada                                            

Talk Title: Perk Tutor: An Open-Source Platform for Ultrasound-Guided Intervention Training        

Bio: Tamas Ungi received MD and PhD degrees in 2006 and 2011 from the University of Szeged in Hungary. He is currently an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the School of Computing and at the Department of Surgery at Queen's University in Canada. He is the Associate Director of Clinical Translation at the Percutaneous Surgery Laboratory. His research interests are image-guided medical interventions, and interventional skills education. He is a primary contributor to open-source software platforms including SlicerIGT for navigated medical interventions and Perk Tutor for teaching procedural skills.


Name: Dr. Aaron Young

Affiliation: Georgia Institute of Technology, USA                   

Talk Title: Control and human performance evaluation of lower limb wearable robotic systems

Bio: Dr. Aaron Young is an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Institute for Robotics & Intelligent Machines. He is director of the Intelligent Prosthetic & Exoskeleton Controls Lab focused on lower limb robotic augmentation. His research focuses on studying human locomotion biomechanics during robotic assistance to help guide the development of control systems. The long term goal is to create clinically viable control systems for robotic lower limb assistive devices that are smart and intuitive to use. His previous experience includes a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Michigan in the Human Neuromechanics Lab working with lower limb exoskeletons and powered orthoses to augment human performance. His dissertation work at Northwestern University in the Center for Bionic Medicine at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago focused on using machine learning to enable an intent recognition system for powered lower limb prostheses.


Name: Nabil Zemiti, PhD

Affiliation: University of Montpellier, France             

Talk Title: Some recent translational research activities on augmented reality and robot assisted surgical gesture guidance.

Bio: Nabil Zemiti is currently Associate Professor at the University of Montpellier and conducting his research activities at the Surgical Robotics team of the LIRMM Lab. He is in charge of the surgical robotics translational research activities and platforms at the Medical School of Montpellier. His research and teaching interests include computer assisted medical interventions and sensor based control for robotic manipulators. Since the beginning of his career he regularly supervises Master thesis, Doctoral thesis and Post-docs in the field of medical robotics. He is also co-organizer of the European Summer Schools on Surgical Robotics since 2013.