Speaker: Melissa Knothe-Tate
Abstract:
At the 2009 National Science Foundation Civil Mechanical and Manufacturing Innovation (CMMI) grantees conference, an afternoon workshop dedicated to the theme of multiscale modeling questioned whether true multiscale models would every be possible without the capacity to capture anatomical structures and physiological behaviors across multiple length and time scales. Recently debuted cutting edge imaging modalities enable unprecedented resolution in macroscopic samples, enabling multiscale imaging from organ to cellular length scale and below. Rapid throughput, high resolution imaging will yield unprecedented insights into emergent structure-function relationships in the human physiome. Yet new challenges related to handling of such massive data sets still beg the question, "How good is good enough?" While previous approaches addressed the question from the perspective of creation of highly idealized models, this talk aims to approach the question from the other extreme.
About the speaker:
Trained as an engineer and biologist at Stanford University and as a mechanical and biomedical engineer at the ETH in Zurich, Melissa Knothe Tate has led international research programs at the AO Research Institute in Davos, Switzerland and the Institute of Biomedical Engineering and Medical Informatics at the ETH In Zurich, Switzerland, as well as Cleveland Clinic, and Case in Cleveland (U.S.A.). Since July 2013 she has served as the inaugural Paul Trainor Chair and Professor of Biomedical Engineering at University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. Prior to that, she served as Director of the Thinktank for Multiscale Computational Modelling of Biomedical and Bio-Inspired Systems as well as Director of the Centre for In Situ Cell and Tissue Imaging at Case Western Reserve University. In the former role, she led a multidisciplinary team in development of virtual models of complex multiscale systems. In the latter, CI Knothe Tate ran a cost centre for multiscale imaging. Both of these provided invaluable, long term experience in coupled multiscale imaging and computational modelling, as well as complex biosystems. Further, she carried out international, collaborative research during her sabbaticals at the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine in New York, Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich, CIC biomaGUNE in San Sebastian, and University of Paris Est. As such, Knothe Tate has a long history of international collaboration and leading of multifaceted international projects. These have resulted in more than 210 peer-reviewed publications, book chapters and proceedings and more than one hundred fifty plenary, keynote and invited talks around the world. In addition to being elected as a Fellow to the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (2011), the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (2013) and the Biomedical Engineering Society (2014), Knothe Tate has earned numerous international awards. Of particular note, Knothe Tate earned the Chairman's Distinguished Life Sciences Scientist Award from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Christopher Columbus Fellowship Foundation (2011), in recognition of outstanding work in the field of life sciences, and the 2009 AO Research Fund Prize Award for unravelling endogenous mechanisms of bone regeneration through quantification of the interplay between bone cells and their environment. Dr. Knothe Tate has protected, patented and licensed a number of technologies at the interface of materials, mechanics and biology. Two of these resulted from coupled multiscale imaging and modelling studies of bone.