Brian Caulfield

Professor Brian Caulfield is a Director of the SFI INSIGHT Centre for Data Analytics (www.insight-centre.org).  A physiotherapist (physical therapist) by training, Brian is also Chair of Physiotherapy at University College Dublin.  Brian’s research programme is focussed on leveraging data from wearable sensing and actuation platforms to deliver better measurement, understanding and enhancement of human performance in health and sport. He has collaborated with a range of multinational and start-up companies such as Intel, BioMedical Research Ltd, Fujitsu Laboratories, Novartis, Kinesis Health Technologies, Shimmer, and INTEL to deliver innovative technology enabled solutions for areas such as sports performance analysis and enhancement, rehabilitation medicine, COPD, Heart Failure, gerontology, and digital endpoint development.

Friedl De Groote

Friedl De Groote is an associate professor in the Human Movement Biomechanics Research Group at the Department of Movement Sciences, KU Leuven, Belgium. She received her MSc degree in Mechanical engineering and her PhD degree in Mechanical engineering from KU Leuven, in 2005 and 2009, respectively. From 2009 until 2016, she was a postdoctoral researcher at KU Leuven. She has been a visiting researcher at Stanford University, the University of Florida, and Georgia Tech/Emory University. She uses a blended computational and experimental approach to study the interaction between motor control and musculoskeletal dynamics in healthy and pathological movement. Key to this approach is the development of numerical methods for analysis and simulation of human motion and modeling of the neuro-musculoskeletal system. Her long-term aim is the development of predictive simulations of human motion that are sufficiently accurate and numerically efficient to be used for the design of training and treatment programs.

Jim Usherwood

I am interested in understanding the optimisations and compromises in animal locomotion from a mechanical perspective. Animals have evolved neither wheels nor propellers, and yet many are proficient at terrestrial, arboreal and aerial locomotion. Should the biological solutions to mechanical challenges – specifically propulsion and weight support – be considered superior, equivalent but alternative, or inferior to the conventional engineered options? I investigate these questions with innovative experimental techniques and with novel applications of traditional engineering analyses.

I am part of the Structure and Motion Lab at The Royal Veterinary College, and am mainly funded by The Wellcome Trust, with further projects supported by BBSRC and EPSRC.