Congratulations to all our award winners at the recent ISB Congress in Stockholm.
David Winter Young Investigator Award (podium)
Arnault Caillet
Development of a high-density EMG-driven Hill-type muscle model
Arnault Caillet, a second-year PhD student, is part of the Structural and Computational biomechanics research group at Imperial College London. He holds a General Engineering MSc from École Centrale de Lyon in France and a Structural Engineering MSc from Imperial College London. He started his PhD in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering in October 2019 under the supervision of Dr Luca Modenese, Dr Andrew TM Phillips and Prof Dario Farina after preliminary collaborations, modelling the foot-ground contact for human walking and running, and investigating neuromusculoskeletal models of healthy individuals to simulate human gaits. He is now developing a novel motor unit Hill-type model, driven by decomposed high-density EMG signals, which connects the spinal synaptic current to the motoneuron pool of the muscle to its contractile machinery with detailed models of the muscle excitation-contraction coupling properties. This model finds relevance in the investigation of the neuromechanics of human skeletal muscles in vivo, in brain-machine interfacing or in exploring how the motoneuron activity influences motor function.
David Winter Young Investigator Award (poster)
Linus Awuniji
The functional role of collagen content in the human cartilage cell microenvironment
Linus Awuniji holds a Bachelor of Mechanical Engineering degree with first-class honors. He graduated top of his class, receiving the Nigerian Society of Engineers (NSE) prize for academic excellence in 2015. Driven by an interest in the application of engineering skills in medicine, in 2020, he completed an MSc. Medical Physics degree via a scholarship from the University of Eastern Finland, where he is also currently studying for a Ph.D degree. Linus’ project seeks to develop a near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy-based machine learning method to estimate the biomechanical properties of human and engineered cartilage tissue. He hopes this project could lead to a fast and accurate means for non-destructive estimation of cartilage tissue integrity. This method could be used for early diagnosis of musculoskeletal diseases such as osteoarthritis. Linus has also presented his work at the Annual Orthopedic Research Society (ORS) meeting, Phoenix, AZ, 2020. Recently, his work was accepted for publication in the Acta Biomaterialia Journal.
David Winter Young Investigator Award (poster)
Barbara Postolka
Tibio-femoral kinematics of natural versus replaced knees–A comparison using dynamic video fluoroscopy
Barbara Postolka received her M.Sc. in human movement sciences and sports with a focus in biomechanics from ETH Zürich, Switzerland in 2015. During her Master studies, she spent three months at the University of Wollongong, Australia, for a research internship under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Julie R. Steele. In 2021 she completed her Ph.D. at the Laboratory for Movement Biomechanics, ETH Zürich, Switzerland led by Prof. Dr. William R. Taylor. Using a unique moving fluoroscope, her Ph.D. research aimed to gain an improved understanding of the in vivo knee joint motion, with a special focus on the role of limb alignment and activity on tibio-femoral kinematics. In her research she is interested in the movement and musculoskeletal loading conditions in both, healthy and pathological subjects, to gain an improved insight into injury mechanisms and joint pathologies and thereby supporting clinical decision making.
ISB World Athletics Award for Biomechanics
Michael Asmussen
The “spring-like” function of the subtalar joint to maintain stability during running
Born and raised in Schreiber, a small town in Northwestern Ontario, Canada, Dr. Michael Asmussen gained a passion for running. After concluding a very mediocre university running career, he found an interest in research with the selfish goal of becoming a faster runner and completed a Master’s degree at Lakehead University and a PhD at McMaster University before becoming a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Calgary studying locomotor biomechanics. Dr. Asmussen is an Assistant Professor and Canada Research Chair at Mount Royal University (MRU), an undergraduate-only university located in Calgary, Canada. At MRU, Dr. Asmussen leads the Foot-Ankle Stability (FASt) Lab where his research focusses on the role that active and passive structures play in our ability to walk and run across the lifecycle.
Promising Scientist Award
Lizeth Sloot
Individualized assistive technology to restore mobility
Lizeth Sloot is a junior research group leader in Computational Biomechanics at the ZITI Institute of Computer Engineering at Heidelberg University. Her research concentrates on the precise biomechanical assessment of motor impairments to aid the development of individualized interventions for persons with limited movement ability. After finishing a Masters in medical physics, Lizeth was awarded her PhD in rehabilitation medicine cum laude from the VU University Amsterdam in 2016. Her doctoral work focused on the application of instrumented assessments, robotic perturbations, and neuromuscular models to characterize movement impairments in children with cerebral palsy to inform their treatment plans. Lizeth applied this biomechanical expertise during her postdoctoral fellowship at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University, where she evaluated the rehabilitative application of wearable exosuit technology to augment the walking ability of post-stroke patients. Since 2019, Lizeth analyses the decline in movement as we get older, to inform the development of smart robotic assistive systems within the inter-institutional HeiAGE project at Heidelberg University. As part of this work, she develops balance assessments that are applicable to understudied dynamic movements such as sitting down, and studies the effectiveness of conventional and active assistive devices to improve mobility and balance using a robotic rollator simulator.
Carlo De Luca Emerging Scientist
Tom Buurke
The neuromechanics of adaptive dynamic balance control in human walking
Dr. Tom Buurke is a human movement scientist, specialized in the neuromechanics of dynamic balance control in human walking. He obtained his PhD from the University of Groningen with Cum Laude honours in 2020 with the thesis ‘Adaptive Control of Dynamic Balance in Human Walking’ under supervision of dr. Claudine Lamoth, dr. Lucas van der Woude and dr. Rob den Otter. During his PhD, Tom was a visiting scholar in dr. James Finley’s lab at the University of Southern California. Currently, Tom is a postdoctoral fellow in dr. Friedl De Groote’s lab at KU Leuven, where he works on predictive simulations of dynamic balance during walking in people post-stroke, funded through an individual postdoctoral fellowship by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO).
Jacqueline Perry Emerging Female Scientist Award
Taylor Dick
Muscles, models, and missed steps: using imaging to explore neuromotor function during steady and perturbed locomotion
Taylor Dick is a Lecturer in The School of Biomedical Sciences and head of the Neuromuscular Biomechanics Laboratory within the Faculty of Medicine at The University of Queensland, Australia. She was awarded her PhD in 2016 from Simon Fraser University, Canada. Her PhD research, in partnership with Harvard University, focused on developing an experimental and modelling framework to predict in vivo motor function using advanced image-driven Hill-type muscle models. Following this, she conducted her postdoctoral research in Biomedical Engineering at North Carolina State University- University of North Carolina (2016-2017) where her research aimed to understand the neuromuscular mechanisms that humans use to recover from perturbations and exoskeleton assistance during locomotion. Taylor’s research group is interested in the neuromuscular and biomechanical mechanisms that underlie healthy and pathological locomotor function. Her team develops new imaging methods and modelling frameworks to answer fundamental questions about how movement underpins evolution, health, and disease, with findings that have application across a broad range of areas. Her research aims to unveil the mechanisms of how muscles work in the body; how muscle-tendon properties and function adapt to external challenges such as size, age, and disease; and how wearable assistive technologies alter the function of musculoskeletal structures. Taylor is passionate about providing opportunities for young girls to engage in STEM and promoting the cross-pollination between the human and comparative biomechanics fields.
Contributed by Tim Derrick (Awards Officer)
