Kimberly Hoang, MD

Talk Title: Clinical robotics in neurosurgery: where are we now and we where are we headed?

Bio: Kimberly B. Hoang, MD, is Assistant Professor in the Department of Neurosurgery at Emory University School of Medicine. A board certified neurosurgeon, Dr. Hoang practices cranial neurosurgical oncology and spinal oncology and specializes in awake tumor surgery, functional mapping for brain tumors, laser interstitial thermal therapy, implantable brachytherapy and minimally invasive surgical techniques.

Dr. Hoang is a member of the Discovery and Developmental Therapeutics Research Program at Winship Cancer Institute. She holds professional memberships with Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Society, American Association of Neurological Surgeons, American Medical Association, Congress of Neurological Surgeons and Tau Beta Pi Engineering Honor Society.

She received her medical degree from The Ohio State University. She completed her internship and residency in neurosurgery at Duke University. She then completed a fellowship in neurosurgical-oncology at UT MD Anderson Cancer Center.

Dr. Hoang is focused on surgical robotics and novel device development for neurosurgical oncology applications. Her current research focuses on microrobotic and meso-robotic devices for cancer diagnosis and therapeutics. She has previously worked on automating surgical resection of brain tumors utilizing macro-scale robotics. Her other research interests include large animal brain tumor model development for novel devices and preclinical testing.

Emmanuel Vander Poorten, Ph.D

Talk Title: Assistive technology for steering flexible instruments and catheters

Bio: Emmanuel (Manu) Vander Poorten is associate Professor at the Faculty of Engineering Technology of KU Leuven (Belgium) where, since 2010, he has been coordinating the activities of the Robot-Assisted Surgery (RAS) group of the Department of Mechanical Engineering. He received the Mechanical Engineering degree in 2000 from KU Leuven, Belgium and obtained the title of Doctor in Engineering in 2007, from Kyoto University, Japan. Since his return to Europe he has been heavily involved in several international projects on assistive technology and surgical robotics. Including RADHAR (navigation assistance for robotic wheelchairs), SCATh, CASCADE, ARTERY (on smart robotic catheters), EurEyeCase (on robot-assisted eye surgery), ATLAS a Marie-Curie Training network on autonomous intraluminal surgery and FAROS on robot-assisted spine surgery. Dr. Vander Poorten is co-founder of CRAS, steering board member of Actuator and frequent contributor to ISMR.

Iulian Iordachita, Ph.D

Talk Title: Enabling Technology for Safe Robot-assisted Retinal Surgery

Bio: Iulian I. Iordachita (IEEE M’08, S’14) is a research faculty within the Mechanical Engineering Department, Whiting School of Engineering, Johns Hopkins University (JHU), faculty core member of the Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics (LCSR), and the director of the Advanced Medical Instrumentation and Robotics Research Laboratory (AMIRo). He received a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Craiova, Romania. Prior to joining JHU in 2004, he completed a postdoctoral fellowship in medical robotics at the Brady Urological Institute, School of Medicine, JHU, USA, and a research fellowship in biomedical engineering at the Graduate School of Frontier Sciences, The University of Tokyo, Japan. He has been editor for the Journal of Medical Robotics Research, editorial board member and guest editor for Sensor, MDPI, and associate editor for IEEE RA-L. His current research interests include medical robotics, image guided surgery, robotics, smart surgical tools, and medical instrumentation. For more information please see https://amiro.lcsr.jhu.edu/

Joseph Singapogu, Ph.D

Talk Title: Towards Improved Patient Outcomes via Simulator-based Clinical Skills Training

Bio: Dr. Joseph Ravi Singapogu is Assistant Professor in the Department of Bioengineering at Clemson University since 2018. He is also an adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of South Carolina-Greenville School of Medicine. Dr. Singapogu’s research focuses on the improvement of clinical skills training using advanced sensors, devices and data-driven methodologies. After completing his PhD, Dr. Singapogu participated in the National Science Foundation’s Innovation Corps (I-Corps) program, exploring the possibility of commercializing the haptic surgical simulation he previously developed. From 2013-2018, Dr. Singapogu was part of the Embedded Scholar program at Clemson and Prisma Health fostering collaborations between clinicians and researchers in medical skills training with simulation technologies. Dr. Singapogu’s research has been funded by both federal and private agencies in the US. He has also served as a reviewer for several leading journals including New England Journal of Medicine, Surgical Innovation and IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering.

Jessica Burgner-Kahrs, Ph.D

Talk Title: Through the Keyhole with Continuum Robots

Bio: Dr. Jessica Burgner-Kahrs is an Associate Professor with the Departments of Mathematical & Computational Sciences, Computer Science, and Mechanical & Industrial Engineering, the founding Director of the Continuum Robotics Laboratory, and Associate Director of the Robotics Institute at the University of Toronto, Canada. She received her Diplom and Ph.D. in computer science from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany in 2006 and 2010 respectively. Before joining the University of Toronto, she was Associate Professor with Leibniz University Hannover, Germany and a postdoctoral fellow with Vanderbilt University, USA.

Her research was recognized with the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize, the Engineering Science Prize, the Lower Saxony Science Award in the category Young Researcher, and she was entitled Young Researcher of the Year 2015 in Germany. She was elected as one of the Top 40 under 40 in the category Science and Society in 2015, 2016, and 2017 by the business magazine Capital and elected one of 100 Young Global Leaders from the World Economic Forum in 2019. Jessica is a Senior member of the IEEE, a Distinguished Lecturer of IEEE Robotics & Automation Society, and serves as a senior editor for IEEE Robotics & Automation Letters.

Nabil Simaan, Ph.D

Talk Title: Design Considerations for Continuum Robots and Statically Balanced Mechanisms for Medical Applications: from shape sensing to minimalistic actuation

Bio: Nabil Simaan (Ph.D, 2002 Technion, Israel) is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Computer Science and Otolaryngology at Vanderbilt University, Nashville TN. He has served as an Editor for IEEE ICRA, associate editor for IEEE TRO, Associate Editor for ASME JMR, and editorial board member for Robotica and a co-chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Surgical Robotics. His research interests include parallel robotics, continuum robotics and design of new robotic systems for dexterous and image-guided surgical robotics. His recent works focuses on use of intraoperative sensing for enabling complementary situational awareness in robot-assisted surgery. He was elected IEEE and ASME Fellow for contributions to dexterous continuum robotics for surgery.

Jaydev P. Desai, Ph.D

Talk Title: Steerable Technologies for Transcatheter and Endovascular Interventions

Bio: Dr. Jaydev P. Desai is currently a Professor at Georgia Tech in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering and holds the G.P. “Bud” Peterson and Valerie H. Peterson Faculty Professorship in Pediatric Research. He is the founding Director of the Georgia Center for Medical Robotics (GCMR) and an 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 MA in Mathematics in 1997 and MSE 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 the lead inventor on the “Outstanding Invention in the 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 and the 2021 IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Distinguished Service Award. He has been an invited speaker at the National Academy of Sciences “Distinctive Voices” seminar series and also invited to attend the National Academy of Engineering’s U.S. Frontiers of Engineering Symposium. He has over 200 publications, is the founding Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Medical Robotics Research, and Editor-in-Chief of the four-volume Encyclopedia of Medical Robotics. At 2018 ICRA, his prior work was the finalist for “IEEE RAS Award for the Most Influential Paper from ICRA 1998”. His research group has received several accolades including the best student paper award, best symposium paper award, cover image of IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, and featured article in the IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering. His current research interests are primarily in the areas of image-guided surgical robotics, pediatric robotics, endovascular robotics, and rehabilitation and assistive robotics. He is a Fellow of IEEE, ASME, and AIMBE.

Mahdi Tavakoli, Ph.D

Talk Title: Machine Learning and Intelligent Control for Robot-assisted Surgery and Rehabilitation

Bio: Mahdi Tavakoli is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Alberta, Canada. He received his BSc and MSc degrees in Electrical Engineering from Ferdowsi University and K.N. Toosi University, Iran, in 1996 and 1999, respectively. 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, medical robotics, and image-guided surgery. Dr. Tavakoli is the lead author of Haptics for Teleoperated Surgical Robotic Systems (World Scientific, 2008). He is a Senior Member of IEEE, Specialty Chief Editor for Frontiers in Robotics and AI (Robot Design Section), and an Associate Editor for the International Journal of Robotics Research, IEEE Transactions on Medical Robotics and Bionics, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, IEEE TMECH/AIM Emerging Topics Focused Section, Journal of Medical Robotics Research, and Medical & Biological Engineering & Computing.

Ann Majewicz Fey, Ph.D

Title: Hardware and Algorithmic Tools to Enhance Surgical Training and Surgical Manipulation

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 at UT Austin as an Associate Professor in August 2020, where she directs the Human-Enabled Robotic Technology Laboratory. She holds at courtesy appointment in the Department of Surgery at UT Southwestern Medical Center and at the Dell Medical School. 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.

Christos Bergeles, Ph.D

Talk Title: V(i)PER: My ongoing clinical translation journey in regenerative retinal therapy delivery

Bio: Christos Bergeles received the Ph.D. degree in Robotics from ETH Zurich, Switzerland, in 2011. He was a postdoctoral research fellow at Boston Children’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts, and the Hamlyn Centre for Robotic Surgery, Imperial College, United Kingdom. He was an Assistant Professor at the Wellcome/EPSRC Centre for Interventional and Surgical Sciences (which he co-founded) at University College London. He is now a Reader (Associate Professor) at King's College London, leading the Robotics and Vision in Medicine Lab. Dr. Bergeles received the Fight for Sight Award in 2014, and the ERC Starting Grant in 2016, and translational funding from the National Institutes of Health Research (UK) in 2018 and 2022. His main research area is image-guided micro-surgical robotics. Dr Bergeles is a Senior Member of IEEE.

Helge Wurdemann, Ph.D

Talk Title: Soft, stiffness-controllable medical devices – future applications and impact

Bio: Helge Wurdemann is a roboticist and Professor of Robotics leading research on soft haptics and robotics at UCL Mechanical Engineering. He is also Co-Director of the Intelligent Mobility at UCL (IM@UCL, www.im-ucl.com) lab, a full-size driving simulator. His Soft Haptics group (www.softhaptics.website) focuses on the hardware design and application of soft material robotic systems that have the ability to change their shape and stiffness on demand bridging the gap between traditional rigid and entirely soft robots. Prof. Wurdemann creates and embeds innovative stiffness-controllable mechanisms as well as combine advanced Artificial Intelligence with control strategies in robotic prototypes emerging from his lab.

Prof. Wurdemann has authored/co-authored more than 100 peer-reviewed papers. The majority of his journal papers are in the top journals of the field, including top transactions and journals of the IEEE and ASME and proceedings of the leading national learned societies in the field, IMechE and IET. He has published his research findings in refereed conference papers in the proceedings of leading conferences in his field. He currently is Associate Editor for prestigious robotics conferences (ICRA and IROS) and served as Associate VP within the IEEE Robotics & Automation Society Conference Activities Board and as member of the IET Robotics and Mechatronics TPN Executive Board. He is Turing Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute and Co-General Chair of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation 2023, the premium robotics conference, which will be hosted for the first time in the UK.

Michael Fisher, Ph.D

Talk Title: Considerations for Regulated Medical Devices

Bio: Mr. Fisher is a professor of the practice in Georgia Tech’s Biomedical Engineering Department. He spent the previous 25 years developing and commercializing medical products, managing manufacturing transfers, performing International sourcing, achieving regulatory concurrence and compliance, navigating intellectual properties, and executing research plans. He led multiple successful 510(k) product launches and has over 60 issued US patents. Michael also managed the product development team at Georgia Tech’s Global Center for Medical Innovation where entrepreneurs and university researchers can develop novel medical technologies. Mr. Fisher earned BS and MS degrees in Engineering Mechanics at Virginia Tech and currently serves on two advisory boards for their College of Engineering. He looks forwards to leveraging his commercial experience to the advancement of biomedical engineering and education.

Jon Lewin, MD

Talk Title: Innovation and Information-Intensive Intervention

Bio: Jonathan S. Lewin, MD, is Professor of Radiology and Imaging Sciences, Professor of Biomedical Engineering, and Professor of Neurosurgery in the Emory School of Medicine and Professor of Health Policy and Management in the Rollins School of Public Health. Until September 2022, he also served as the Executive Vice President for Health Affairs, Emory University; Executive Director, Woodruff Health Sciences Center; and CEO and Chairman of the Board, Emory Healthcare. Dr. Lewin is a national leader in academic medicine strategy and integrated health care delivery and an international scientific leader in interventional and intraoperative MRI.

Prior to his Emory appointment, Dr. Lewin served as the Martin Donner Professor and Chairman of the Russell H. Morgan Department of Radiology and Radiological Science at Johns Hopkins University and the Radiologist-in-Chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital from 2004 until 2016, with secondary appointments as Professor of Oncology, Neurosurgery, and Biomedical Engineering. From 2012-2016 he also served as Co-Chair for Strategic Planning and from 2013-2016 as Senior Vice President for Integrated Healthcare Delivery for Johns Hopkins Medicine. Before joining the faculty of Johns Hopkins, Dr. Lewin was the Director of the Division of Magnetic Resonance Imaging at University Hospitals of Cleveland and Professor and Vice Chairman for Research and Academic Affairs in the Department of Radiology at Case Western Reserve University.

Dr. Lewin received his undergraduate degree in chemistry from Brown University in 1981 and his Doctor of Medicine from Yale University in 1985. Following his internship in pediatrics at Yale-New Haven Hospital and residency in diagnostic radiology at University Hospitals of Cleveland, he completed a magnetic resonance research fellowship in Germany, a neuroradiology fellowship at the Cleveland Clinic, and additional training in head and neck radiology at the Pittsburgh Eye and Ear Hospital. Dr. Lewin is a pioneer in interventional and intraoperative MR imaging and has published more than 200 peer-reviewed scientific manuscripts and over 70 book chapters, reviews, commentaries, and other invited papers on topics including the basic science and clinical aspects of interventional MR imaging, functional MRI, head and neck imaging, MR angiography, and the imaging of acute stroke.

Dr. Lewin holds 28 U.S. and seven international patents and has been PI or co-PI on NIH and other federal and state grants with awards of more than $54 million, as well as a co-investigator on a number of other grants and projects. He is a Fellow of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine and of the American College of Radiology and has lectured around the world on a number of topics in magnetic resonance imaging, interventional radiology, neuroradiology, and leadership in academic medicine. He has served on numerous national committees, editorial boards, and grant review groups for foundations and the NIH, and on the task force on minimally invasive cancer therapy for the National Cancer Institute. Dr. Lewin is past president of the Society of Chairs of Academic Radiology Departments, the American Roentgen Ray Society, the Association of University Radiologists, the International Society for Strategic Studies in Radiology, and the Academy for Radiology Research.

Kevin Cleary, Ph.D

Talk Title: MRI Robotics for Minimally Invasive Procedures in the Bore of the Magnet

Bio: Kevin Cleary is a research scientist with over 15 years of experience in medical research. He is currently an Associate Director at the Sheikh Zayed Institute for Pediatric Surgical Innovation at Children’s National Medical. He serves as the Engineering lead and directs the Bioengineering Team.

He received Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Duke University, and completed a Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin in 1990. His dissertation research involved software development and computer graphics for robotic manipulators. He was then a postdoctoral researcher in robotics at a Japanese research lab.

After several years working in technology positions at NASA (North American Space Administration) and the DOD (Department of Defense), he moved to Georgetown University in 1996 as an Assistant Professor, which marked the start of his medical research career. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2001, and full Professor in 2010. When he left Georgetown to join Children’s in 2011, he was the Director of the Information Systems and Imaging Sciences (ISIS) research center.

At Children’s he set up and organized the engineering team for the institute and has directed the engineering activities since the beginning. He has worked with numerous clinical departments through the hospital, including surgery, radiology, the ICUs, rehabilitation, and the ER.

For the last 20 years, he has worked in the field of computer-aided surgery, focusing on developing technology for minimally invasive procedures. He was the driving force behind the first clinical trial of robotically assisted nerve blocks, and introduced image-guided navigation using electromagnetic tracking for lung biopsy in a clinical trial at Georgetown University Medical Center. He was funded by NIH to develop the open source software The Image-Guided Surgical Toolkit (IGSTK) which has been used by many researcher worldwide to develop prototype systems. His current R01 funding includes several projects related to MRI compatible robotics, focused on shoulder arthrography, pain injections, and long bone biopsy. He has also developed an ankle rehabilitation robot for children with cerebral palsy that is now in clinical trial.

Aaron Young, Ph.D

Talk Title: AI Systems for Wearable Lower-Limb Robotic Systems for Patients with Walking Disability

Bio: Dr. Aaron Young is an Associate Professor and Woodruff Faculty Fellow in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech and has directed the Exoskeleton and Prosthetic Intelligent Controls (EPIC) lab since 2016. Dr. Young received his MS and PhD degrees in Biomedical Engineering with a focus on neural and rehabilitation engineering from Northwestern University in 2011 and 2014 respectively. He received a BS degree in Biomedical Engineering from Purdue University in 2009. He also completed 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 research area is in advanced control systems for robotic prosthetic and exoskeleton systems for humans with movement impairment. He combines machine learning, robotics, human biomechanics, and control systems to design wearable robots to improve the community mobility of individuals with walking disability. He has received an NIH New Innovator Award, NIH NCMRR New Investigator award and IEEE New Faces of Engineering award, and his EPIC lab group recently won the International VIP Consortium Innovation Competition. He has over 50 peer-reviewed journal publications primarily in IEEE and ASME journals and is an associate editor for the Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) journal.

Kirsten Williams, MD

Talk Title: Robotic Advances to Address Clinical Challenges

Bio: Dr. Kirsten Williams is a pediatric oncologist who specializes in bone marrow transplantation and immunotherapy. She trained at Georgetown University School of Medicine, residency at Rainbow Babies Children’s Hospital, and completed her fellowship at the National Institutes of Health/Johns Hopkins University. In addition to caring for patients with the highest risk leukemias, she is a translational researcher focused on transplant complications including infections, lung complications, relapse, and immune activation syndromes such as graft versus host disease. Dr. Williams has published 75 papers, developed and conducted 6 trials, and is currently R-funded. She is fortunate to have developed several collaborations at the Georgia Institute of Technology, including one with Dr. Desai in robotics.