Auckland Bioengineering Institute UoA

Huge congratulations to Manuela Zimmer, who successfully defended her PhD thesis recently and received summa cm laude! In Germany, this award represents the absolute highest doctoral grade and is reserved for truly exceptional candidates. Manuela has already published nine papers, with two more in review.

Although Manuela is technically a PhD student from the University of Stuttgart, she has been (and remains) an important member of the musculoskeletal modelling group and the ABI, working closely with Geoff Handsfield and our colleagues at Mātai.

Congratulations also to Filiz Ates, Manuela’s supervisor, and we look forward to having Filiz visit us at the ABI over the next three years as the recent recipient of the Julius von Haast Fellowship :)

Celebrations all around!

Congratulations to Max Dang Vu, who just defended his thesis!

Max's PhD research focused on developing biomechanical and surrogate modelling for breast cancer imaging applications. This included the application of augmented reality techniques to potentially locate and track internal lesions.

This work provides a solid foundation for enabling navigational guidance for diagnostic and surgical applications in breast cancer - an effort being accelerated here at ABI collaboratively and for wider applications with Huidong and his team!

Please join us in congratulating Max on this great achievement!

NEW fully funded PhD project available. Want to study AI-driven modelling of apple tissue and how it applies to food quality and supply chains? Work at the interface of bioengineering and computational physics. Apply now: https://www.auckland.ac.nz/en/abi/study-with-us/study-options/find-a-project/phd-projects/abi-phd-project-46.html

Congratulations to Mehran Akbarpour Ghazani, who successfully defended his PhD thesis recently. His thesis was titled The Automated Construction and Verification of Physically Plausible Models of Physiological Systems.

Mehran's work explored the use of bond graph modelling in biology and physiology and how to leverage bond graph concepts in the verification of systems biology models encoded in SBML or CellML. The examiner was very impressed with Mehran's work, and they had some great discussion on how Mehran's work might help with the verification and clinical translation of their own data-driven machine learning models.

Mehran will start working with Aroa Biosurgery. Congratulations, Mehran!

New funding for a University of Auckland-developed implantable brain pressure sensor brings it a step closer to helping people with a potentially fatal condition, hydrocephalus.

Dr Sarah-Jane Guild holds up a tiny wireless brain sensor. It looks a bit like a glass electrical fuse; about the size of a paracetamol tablet, if that tablet was shaved down to a rectangle.

Guild, a senior research leader at the Auckland Bioengineering Institute, has been part of developing this world-first, Kiwi-designed medical device for 14 years.

Human trials in 2024 and 2025 showed the device is safe. Now, she and her colleagues are a step closer to achieving the ultimate goal – getting it into the hands (or rather the heads) of patients with hydrocephalus – a potentially life-threatening condition caused by a build-up of fluid in the brain.

In a tough research funding market, Guild was awarded $1.2 million in the latest Health Research Council round. The grant will allow her team to collect data on the impact of the sensors on clinical care and quality of life for patients.

She will also be looking at the economics of the device – the potential costs and savings for the New Zealand health system.

If everything goes well, Kiwi adults and children (most people with hydrocephalus are children) might be able to access the sensors in just a couple of years.

Parallel steps being undertaken by Kitea Health, an Auckland Bioengineering Institute spin-out company, to secure Food and Drug Administration approval for the device in the US could see patients there getting the sensors not too long after their counterparts in New Zealand.

Congratulations to Qin Wu, who defended her PhD thesis recently!

Qin was part of our Augmented Human Lab and Empathic Computing Lab. Her primary research focused on using interactive technology to support children with autism, particularly in training daily living skills, social skills, and peer-related social activities.

Qin is now based in Memphis, Tennessee, in the US.

Congratulations, Qin!

Congratulations to Stephen Creamer, who successfully defended his PhD project recently.

Stephen advanced the applicability of cardiovascular and heart models to use accessible data from clinical practice. Specifically, his work improved the understanding of parameter identifiability and calibration of cardiovascular models, while proposing novel cardiac energetic biomarkers to better describe cardiac function. He actively disseminated these advances in multiple world-renowned conferences, building a strong research network with leaders in cardiovascular modelling.

Great work Stephen!

Congratulations to Andrew Lowry, who successfully defended his PhD thesis recently!

He did a great job responding to a thorough examination of his work developing a custom device for vibration therapy in muscle spasticity.

Special thanks for the guidance he received from his supervisory team including Thor Besier and Massoud Alipour from ABI, and Angus McMorland from Exercise, Sport and Rehabilitation Sciences who supported Andrew's experimental work at Newmarket.

Andrew currently works as a researcher at AUT. Well done Andrew!

Mathias Roesler’s studies have taken him from artificial intelligence in champagne production, to the electrical activity of the uterus, to life-or-death risk modelling for surgery. And he’s not even 30.

It was perhaps inevitable that Mathias Roesler – the newly-minted Dr Roesler – would do a PhD. His parents met at Princeton in the US while doing their own doctorates (his father in mechanical and aerospace engineering, his mum on French poet and philosopher Yves Bonnefoy), and they later moved their nascent family to France, where Mathias would (even later) do his undergrad and masters degrees at Paris’ prestigious Sorbonne University.

But it was his paternal step-grandfather, a French physics professor turned education reformer, who Mathias credits as having the biggest influence on his academic path. Robert Chabbal not only believed in his young grandson (“He always told me I would do a PhD”), but he set up the engineering degree and masters programmes that was to set Mathias on the path of practical bioengineering – and eventually his PhD.

One day after work Mathias sat on the couch with a map of the world and looked for English-speaking countries he could imagine living in, and which had interesting – and funded – PhD options.

“New Zealand was right in front of me.”

Mathias joined a group at the University of Auckland’s Auckland Bioengineering Institute working towards the understanding, diagnosis and eventual treatment for the one-in-ten women of childbearing age who suffer from painful and debilitating uterus-related conditions like endometriosis.

In particular, he was looking at how the electrical signalling in the uterus worked (and changed) during a rat’s menstrual cycle.

“I was lucky to have three very different angles to my PhD: imaging the uterus using high-resolution imaging methods; experiments where I recorded electrical signals; and modelling where I developed computer simulation and models of the rat uterus.

“I learned a lot and felt like I was doing something with purpose.”

Read more at abi.ac.nz

Computers that can detect and even respond to human emotions may seem like the stuff of science fiction. But the potential, especially in mental health care, is enormous.

Imagine a wearable device that monitors your emotional state, using brain sensor technology to detect early signs of stress, anxiety or low mood before you’ve even noticed them yourself. That kind of technology could help people manage conditions like depression or burnout, or alert healthcare providers when someone needs support.

New Auckland Bioengineering Institute graduate Alireza Farrokhi Nia’s PhD has taken a step closer to that goal. He has developed a system that avoids facial expression or tone of voice (signals that people can easily hide), instead going straight to the source: the brain.

Unlike other research in this space, Reza’s work combined two types of brain-monitoring technology: EEG, which captures electrical activity, and fNIRS, which measures changes in blood oxygen levels.

He recorded volunteers’ brain signals while they listened to music, everyday sounds (parents fighting, glass shattering, a running river), and watched videos (including funny cat compilations, the joyful moment a deaf baby hears her sister’s voice for the first time, news footage of famine, and neutral clips like a barbershop haircut) designed to trigger a full range of emotional responses.

Reza says he wasn't trying to measure whether someone felt ‘happy’ or ‘sad’ in any simple sense – human emotion is too complex for that.

Instead, he measured emotion along broad dimensions based on how pleasant the feeling was and how intense.

Collecting the data was a huge undertaking. More than 100 people took part, each spending around two hours in the lab. Every detail had to be controlled from lighting to the words spoken to participants, even down to Reza wearing the same cologne for months so nothing unintentionally influenced the subjects’ mood.

Once the recordings were complete, the real challenge began: building AI models that could interpret the brain signals. Harder still, he needed models that worked across different people, not just one individual.

Read more at abi.ac.nz