Brief biographies of Invited speakers

Prof. Mark Biggs

Professor Biggs, who received his PhD in 1996, holds the Chair of Chemical Engineering at The University of Adelaide where he is also the Head of School and Director of the Bio & Nanoengineering Faculty Research Group.

He returned to Australia to take up the Chair in December 2008 following 15 years in UK academia, most recently at The University of Edinburgh. He also held a visiting lectureship at the University of Stuttgart and is a recipient of a prestigious Royal Academy of Engineering/Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowship.

His research is focused on the molecular, meso-scale and multi-scale modelling and experimental study of interfacial systems for the elucidation of fundamentals and design. The interfacial systems of current interest include nanoporous carbons, proteins at solid interfaces, and multiphase fluids.

 

Prof. Lutz Claes

Professor Lutz Claes is Emeritus Professor of Biomechanics and former Director of the Institute of Orthopaedic Research and Biomechanics at the University of Ulm. Professor Claes has an international reputation as a leading researcher in the field of musculoskeletal biomechanics and has made significant contributions to understanding the role of mechanics in bone healing and regeneration. Professor Claes has performed extensive experimental research to characterise and understand the role of mechanical influences on the healing of bone fractures. He has published over 370 peer reviewed papers in this field and has been one of the pioneers in the development of computational models to simulate tissue differentiation processes during bone repair and regeneration.

Prof. Dr. Georg Duda

Professor Georg Duda is director of the Julius Wolff Institute and Professor of Biomechanics and Musculoskeletal Regeneration at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin. He is interested in the tension between the fields of Biology and Mechanics in the study of the musculoskeletal system. He is involved in investigating the interaction between bone and muscles as well as the biomechanical influences and its impacts in both the intact and injured musculoskeletal system (e.g. loading of joints and bones). Particularly, he focuses on the on the interaction between the physical and mechanical conditions, and the biological regeneration of the musculoskeletal system. Using examples of bone and cartilage healing, he has demonstrated the importance of biomechanical characteristics for cells and tissues of the human musculoskeletal system. He showed that a certain amount of mechanical stimulation is helpful to healing, while too much could result in a delay to the healing processes.

Professor Duda also undertakes research on regenerative medicine with a focus on understanding the body’s own processes and how to stimulate these processes, where necessary, to reproduce natural regeneration of the musculoskeletal system.

 Dr Alf Gerisch

Dr Alf Gerisch is a Lecturer in the Department of Mathematics at Technical University of Darmstadt. He received his PhD from the University of Halle-Wittenberg. Dr Gerisch’s research interests include: Numerical methods for the simulation of taxis-diffusion-reaction systems, High-order two-step peer methods and their use as time-stepping schemes in the finite element modelling software Kardos, Mathematical modelling and numerical simulation of bone fracture healing and of mechanical properties of bone, Splitting methods for ordinary and partial differential equations.

Dr Gerisch is currently undertaking externally funded projects focusing on simulated cartilage production, and multiscale structure-functional modelling of musculoskeletal mineralized tissues.

Prof. Dietmar Hutmacher

Professor Dietmar Hutmacher is Professor and Chair in Regenerative Medicine at Queensland University of Technology. Professor Hutmacher’s background is a strong combination of academic and industrial.  His expertise is in biomaterials, biomechanics, medical devices and tissue engineering and he is one of the few academics to take a holistic bone engineering concept to clinical application.  More than 400 patients have been treated with the FDA-approved bone engineering scaffolds developed by Prof Hutmacher’s Singapore-based interdisciplinary research group. Over the last 4 years, Professor Hutmacher has developed an international track record in adult stem cell research related to regenerative medicine. Professor Hutmacher has three main areas of research: Cartilage, Bone Graft and 3D Cell Culture.

Prof. David Lloyd

David Lloyd is Director and Professor of the Musculoskeletal Research Program at the Griffith Health Institute, Australia. His research interests are neuromuscular skeletal computational modelling, muscular skeletal injuries of the lower limb, osteoarthritis of the lower limb joints, tissue engineering treatment of tendinopathy and cartilage, and training to prevent muscular skeletal injuries and disease. He is member of the American Society for Biomechanics, the American College of Sports Medicine, the Australian and New Zealand Society of Biomechanics, the Canadian Society of Biomechanics, the International Society of Biomechanics, and Sports Medicine Australia.

Dr Tobias Meckel

Dr Tobias Meckel is Leader of the Membrane Dynamics Research Group within the Department of Biology at Technical University of Darmstadt. Dr Meckel is an expert in single molecule microscopy and has developed novel techniques to enable the examination of mammalian and plant cells in three dimensional culture. His group is particularly interested in understanding cell membrane dynamics and the interactions between the membrane, cytoskeleton, signalling pathways and the extracellular matrix during cell adhesion. Dr Meckel was recently funded by the German Research Foundation to establish a graduate program in this area in collaboration with the Departments of Chemistry, Biology and Physics at TU Darmstadt, the Helmholtz Institute for Heavy Ion Research and the Frankfurt University Hospital.

Dr Richard Weinkamer

Details pending