Dr. Manisha gupta

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Dr. Gupta joined the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at the University of Alberta in September 2014 as an Assistant Professor. She has over 20 years of research experience and obtained her PhD. in Electrical Engineering from Yale University in 2009 with a MSc from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2002. She has been involved in different areas of research and development in academia, scientific labs and industry. She has conducted material growth and optimization, device design and fabrication for both electronic and optoelectronic applications, semiconductor fabrication including material and electrical characterization, surface functionalization. She has developed device based sensors for biosensing and optical sensors for solid content detection and label free cell detection. She also has industrial experience of working at a start-up company and at ACAMP in Edmonton. Her lab has recently developed a POC SARS-COV2 sensor recently which has been transferred to a local company for commercialization. Also, she is currently working on developing diabetic wound multi-variate sensors using 3D printing. In addition, her group also conducts work in the area of 2D materials, electronic devices, light scattering based detection and nano photonics. 

Dr. Greg Kawchuk is a professor in Rehab Medicine and Physical Therapy. His research interests focus on defining the mechanisms that initiate and sustain spinal disorders so that clinically relevant strategies can be developed toward their prevention or resolution. A major component of his research involves developing new technologies to assess spinal structure and function, then using those technologies to evaluate various clinical interventions. 

Dr. Bradley Kerr received his BSc in Psychology from McGill University. He then went on to obtain a PhD in Neuroscience from the University of London-King’s College in the UK. His PhD research was aimed at understanding the role of novel modulatory peptides, growth factors and pro-inflammatory cytokines in persistent pain. Dr. Kerr went on to do postdoctoral work at the California Institute of Technology and at McGill University where his work focused on studying inflammatory responses after nervous system injury. 

Dr. Kerr joined the Department of Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine at the University of Alberta in 2007 and is also an adjunct professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Psychiatry. The focus of research in his lab is aimed at addressing the mechanisms of chronic pain after injury or disease with a major focus on chronic pain associated with Multiple Sclerosis.

Dr. Adalberto Loyola-Sanchez completed his medical and specialty training in Mexico City and his research training at McMaster University (MSc and PhD, Vanier scholar) and at the University of Calgary (postdoctoral studies, Banting scholar). Since then, he has been working on developing a program of research to design, implement and evaluate community-based rehabilitation programs for people living with disabilities produced by chronic illnesses. This program has mainly focused on under-served populations (i.e. Indigenous rural communities in Mexico and Canada).

He is currently working clinically in the Spinal Cord Injury Program at the Glenrose Rehabilitation Hospital in Edmonton, and is working on expanding his program of research to include the neurological population, especially Spinal Cord Injury. 

Dr. Christopher McCabe is the CEO and Executive Director of the Institute of Health Economics (IHE).  Dr. McCabe brings more than 25 years of experience as a health economist to his role with the organization. He trained and worked for 20 years in the UK before emigrating to Canada. During this time he held Full Professorships at the Universities of Sheffield, Warwick and Leeds. He was more recently a Professor of Health Economics at the University of Alberta, where he was appointed Capital Health Endowed Research Chair at the University of Alberta, leading two Genome Canada research groups focused on the evaluation, adoption and implementation of Precision Medicine technologies. 

He also served on the Canadian Agency for Drugs and Technologies in Health Care (CADTH) Health Economics Working Group, which authored the 4th Edition of the CADTH Guidelines for the Economic Evaluation of Health Technologies in 2017. He was lead author of the addendum to the CADTH Guidelines focused on co-dependent therapies, published in 2019. More recently Dr. McCabe advised the Patented Medicines Price Review Board on the technical issues related to the revision of their regulations for setting the price of new drugs in Canada. He is currently Chair of the Royal Society of Canada COVID Task Force Working Group on the Economy.

Dr. Michael Lipsett is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Alberta (U of A). Mike had a career in industrial R&D and operations in the Canadian nuclear and oil industries prior to joining the U of A in 2006. He currently holds the Poole Chair in Management for Engineers and is Director of Innovation, Creativity, and Entrepreneurship for the Faculty of Engineering. 

His research interests focus on automating diagnostics to improve the reliability of complex energy and environmental systems. He also develops robotic systems for remote and hazardous environments. Mike has 150+ published works on these and related topics. 

Dr. Marilène Oliver works at a crossroads between new digital technologies, traditional print and sculpture, her finished objects bridging the virtual and the real worlds. Oliver uses various scanning technologies, such as MRI and CT to reclaim the interior of the body and create art works that allow us to materially contemplate our increasingly digitized selves. Her current research focuses on using medical scan data to create artistic XR experiences as part of multimedia installations.  

Marilène Oliver is an assistant professor of printmaking at the University of Alberta, Canada. Oliver studied Fine Art at Central Saint Martins and the Royal College of Art where she obtained an MPhil with research project ‘Flesh to Pixel, Flesh to Voxel, Flesh to XYZ’. Oliver has exhibited internationally in both private and public galleries including the Victoria and Albert Museum, The Wellcome Trust (UK), MassMoCA, Knoxville Museum of Art (USA) Frissarias Museum (Greece), Casino Luxembourg (Luxembourg), Fundació Sorigué(Spain) and The Glenbow Museum (Canada).

Her work is held in a number of private collections around the world as well as a number of public collections such as The Wellcome Trust, Victoria and Albert Museum and Knoxville Museum of Art. Oliver leads several interdisciplinary research projects including Dyscorpia: Future Intersections of the Body and Technology and Know Thyself as a Virtual Reality. Oliver is also the host of LASERAlberta, a public series of art and science events which is part of the international Leonardo/ISAST network.

Dr. Danielle Peers is a Canada Research Chair in Disability and Movement Cultures (Tier II SSHRC), and an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Kinesiology, Sport, and Recreation at the University of Alberta. 

Their research builds on their experiences as a Paralympic athlete, National Ambassador for Muscular Dystrophy Canada, social justice activist, and dance and video artist. Their work in each of these areas often overlap, with qualitative, interdisciplinary, and art-based and research-creation methodologies often used to produce and share knowledge.

Dr. Patrick Pilarski is a Canada CIFAR AI Chair and principal investigator with the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute and the Reinforcement Learning and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (RLAI).

Dr. Pilarski’s research interests include reinforcement learning, real-time machine learning, human-machine interaction, rehabilitation technology, and assistive robotics.  Within the SMART Network's BLINC Lab (Bionic Limbs for Improved Natural Control) , he leads an interdisciplinary initiative focused on creating intelligent artificial limbs to restore and extend abilities for people with amputations. 

Dr. Jason Plemel began his training in the laboratory of Dr. Wolfram Tetzlaff where he completed his Doctorate. There he investigated two separate strategies to improve white matter regeneration: transplantation of precursor cells to replace lost oligodendrocytes and cell culture to find novel targets to improve remyelination. During Dr. Plemel’s postdoctoral work he studied the contribution of microglia following myelin injury in the laboratories of Dr. Peter Stys and Dr. Wee Yong. His interdisciplinary project investigated mechanisms of how immune cells respond to primary degeneration. As well, he developed a new tool to image cell death and injury using spectral microscopy.

As a new faculty at the University of Alberta, Dr. Plemel and his laboratory, Alberta Neuroimmunology and Pain Laboratory are investigating how microglia play an important role in the regeneration of injured white matter, but also how microglia can induce injury to white matter during different disease conditions.

Dr. Hossein Rouhani is in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Alberta, specializing in musculoskeletal biomechanics; wearable systems for daily health monitoring, postural balance and risk of falling assessment, gait and movement disorder measurement, neuroprosthesis design, biomedical instrumentation design and biomedical data processing.

Dr. Dan Sameoto is an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Alberta and the CTO of ZiprPrint Inc.  He is an interdisciplinary researcher with degrees in mechanical engineering from Dalhousie University and a Ph.D. in Engineering Science from Simon Fraser University and his research program combines elements of mechanical, electrical and materials engineering in one lab.

Dr. Sameoto’s primary expertise is invention, making significant contributions in fields ranging from MEMS, microfabrication and microfluidics, to multi-material 3D printing, soft robotics, cube satellites and biomimetic smart materials.  

His current research areas include intelligent materials, with shape and stiffness switching in response to external stimuli, soft robotic technology for wearables, and stretchable electronics for cybernetic nervous system integration.  In addition to his work with the SMART Network, Dr. Sameoto is also working on 3D printing with recycled waste materials, new deployable systems for cube satellite instruments, and next generation waste water membrane filtration systems.

Dr. Lingzi Sang obtained her B.S. from Xiamen University and her Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Arizona. Prior to joining the Department of Chemistry at the University of Alberta, Dr. Sang conducted her postdoc research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Dr. Sang is an emerging independent investigator who seeks to advance materials and devices that convert and store energy harvested from sustainable resources. Dr. Sang’s research directly benefits Canada by discovering technologies that aid in the transition from a fossil fuel-based economy to a sustainable economy. Starting as an independent principal investigator at the U of A in September 2018, Dr. Sang is developing analytical tools that directly measure the molecular processes occurring at the interfaces of the electrochemical devices in operation.

Dr. Richard Sutton is a distinguished research scientist at DeepMind in Edmonton and a professor in the Department of Computing Science at the University of Alberta. He has worked  half of his career in corporate research labs, including AT&T Labs and GTE Labs. His research interests center on the learning problems facing a decision-maker interacting with its environment, which he sees as central to intelligence. 

Dr. Sutton is a founder of the research startup Noggin AI.

Dr. Richard Thompson focuses on the development and translation of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) for the clinical evaluation of cardiovascular and musculoskeletal disease and the understanding of disease mechanisms.

Dr. Kathryn Todd is Vice President, Provincial Clinical Excellence at Alberta Health Services (AHS). She is responsible for providing provincial leadership of the Strategic Clinical Networks TM, Health Innovation and Evidence, Data and Analytics and the provincial programs and services of Continuing Care and Senior's Health, Addictions and Mental Health, Indigenous Health, Population and Public Health and Enhancing Care in Community.

Dr. Todd is an active researcher at the University of Alberta, where she continues to investigate the central nervous system response to disease and injury with a focus on inflammation.

Dr. Ross Tsuyuki is a Professor of Medicine (Cardiology), and Director, EPICORE Centre in the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry at the University of Alberta. His interests include improving the care of patients with heart failure and hypertension, prevention of cardiovascular disease, pharmacy practice research, provision of support for other researchers and training the next generation of health researchers.

Dr. Richard Uwiera is a Professor within the Department of Agricultural, Food and Nutritional Science, a fully licensed veterinarian, and the University of Alberta (U of A) Veterinary Pathologist. He is also a Faculty member of Agricultural, Life and Nutritional Sciences with part-time secondment to the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry.  

His research is focused on enhanced intestinal health and performance in livestock and understanding the pathophysiology of intestinal disease. Within the context of the SMART Network and in collaboration with Dr. Vivian Mushahwar, he explores the application of animal models to further scientific discovery. This includes the development of small and large animal surgical models and unique anesthetic and treatment protocols to investigate spinal cord and extra-spinal cord injury.  

Dr. Albert Vette is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Alberta ( U of A), and a Research Scientist at the Glenrose Rehabilitation Hospital in Edmonton. He also is a member of the Neuroscience and Mental Health Institute (NMHI) and an affiliate within the Department of Biomedical Engineering, which are both at the (U of A).

Dr. Vette and Dr. Rouhani are the co-directors of the Neuromuscular Control & Biomechanics Laboratory Their goal is to enhance the quality of life of aging individuals and those affected by movement impairments.

Dr. Vette's current research activities include the identification of active and passive mechanisms involved in human postural control, characterizing the role of sensory noise in sensorimotor speed of processing, establishing quantitative techniques for effective evaluation of rehabilitation outcomes and developing advanced assistive technologies for postural control using functional electrical stimulation.