Dr. Kim Adams

Dr. Kim Adams is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Rehabilitation Medicine.  Her background is Electrical Engineering and Rehabilitation Sciences, and works in the area of assistive technology for children who have physical and communicative impairments.

In her clinical research stream she applies commercial assistive technology and assistive robots for children with physical disabilities to engage in play and learning activities. In her technical research stream the focus is on the development of technology interfaces and manipulators. This stream incorporates brain control interfaces and haptic feedback in robots, with the goal to make robots and other technology as easy to use as possible by children to perform their play activities.​

Dr. Armin Badre graduated from the University of Alberta (U ofA) Faculty of Medicine in 2012. He then completed his Orthopaedic Surgery training at the University of Alberta in 2017. Upon graduation, he went to the Roth McFarlane Hand and Upper Limb Centre (HULC), a world-renowned upper extremity specialized centre, to subspecialize in the management of complex elbow, hand, and wrist reconstruction and trauma. While at HULC, he also completed a Master of Science in Surgery focused on elbow biomechanics under the supervision of Drs. Graham King and Jim Johnson.

Dr. Badre joined the Western Upper Limb Facility (WULF) at Sturgeon Hospital in 2019. His clinical practice is focused on the management of various elbow, hand, and wrist conditions including arthroscopy, arthroplasty, and upper extremity trauma.

Dr. Badre has an academic appointment with the U of A Faculty of Medicine and is involved with the teaching of medical students, residents, and fellows. He is quite keen on the advancement of knowledge through high-quality clinical and biomechanical research and is currently the research lead at WULF. He has published his work in a number of prestigious journals and presented at various national and international scientific meetings.

Dr. Pierre Boulanger has a double appointment as a Professor at the University of Alberta, Department of Computing Science, and at the Department of Radiology and Diagnostic Imaging. He is currently the Director of the Advanced
​Man-Machine Interface Laboratory (AMMI) as well as the Scientific Director of the SERVIER Virtual Cardiac Centre. In 2013, Dr. Boulanger was awarded the CISCO chair in healthcare solutions, a ten years investment by CISCO systems in the development of new IT technologies for healthcare in Canada.

His main research topics are on the development of new techniques for telemedicine, patient-specific modeling using sensor fusion, and the application of telepresence technologies to medical training, simulation, and collaborative diagnostics. Dr. Boulanger is also the CTO and founder of Naiad Lab Inc., a company specialized in the applications of virtual clinics.​

Dr. Bo Cao is trained in mathematics (BSc), psychology (MSc), computational neuroscience (PhD), neuroimaging and psychiatry (postdoc).  He has a strong passion for understanding the fundamental mechanisms of how the brain works and how to cure the brain when the mechanisms are disturbed.

As the Canada Research Chair in Computational Psychiatry (Tier 2), he aims to develop translational tools that can provide accurate and personalized diagnosis and treatment optimization for mental disorders.

Dr. Taymy J. Caso, PhD, (they/she) is an Assistant Professor of Counseling Psychology at the University of Alberta and Director of the Intersectional Research, Empowerment, Advocacy, and Community Health Promotion (IREACH) Lab. Prior to working at the UofA, Dr. Caso completed the Randi and Fred Ettner Postdoctoral Fellow in Transgender Health in the Eli Coleman Institute for Sexual and Gender Health and maintains a research affiliation at the National Center for Gender Spectrum Health. Dr. Caso holds degrees in counseling and clinical psychology from New York University and Columbia University, Teachers College. Their research focuses on minority health disparities, intersectionality, identity-based marginalization within LGBTQ+ BIPOC communities, gender and sexual fluidity, social determinants of health and legislative and public policy advocacy. They hold several leadership roles including Chair for the American Psychological Association’s Committee on Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity (APA CSOGD), Chair-Elect for the APA’s Division 17’s Section for the Advocacy of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity (SASOGD), Vice Director of Justice, Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Access for the Institute of Smart Augmentative and Restorative Technologies and Health Innovations (iSMART). Their advocacy work utilizes anti-oppressive and decolonizing pedagogies to deconstruct institutional and systemic barriers to equity and develop community- based interventions for underserved communities. They have been the recipient of several grants and awards, including: the Steven J. Schochet Endowment Course Development and Enhancement, Postdoctoral Award in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, Samuel Eshborn Award, Outstanding Research Contribution Award, Research and Scholarship Showcase Award, César Chávez/Clara Hale Community Outreach Award, Ronald McNair/Arturo Alfonso Schomburg Academic Excellence Award, and the Arthur B. Zankel Urban Fellowship. These awards recognize scholarship, service, advocacy, and activism that support and empower marginalized and underrepresented communities.

Dr. Craig Chapman is a cognitive neuroscientist who is fascinated by the way we move. His work is motivated by a simple idea: to watch someone move is to watch them think.

In his lab, Dr. Chapman uses a detailed analysis of sensorimotor processing that integrates eye-tracking, electroencephalography (EEG) and motion-tracking, and has shown that a decision about making a movement doesn’t end once the movement is initiated, but continues until the movement is complete. This means that movements provide a window into deciding and thinking, and that movement recording is a powerful research tool for science and diagnostic tool for medicine.  ​

Dr. Hyun-Joong Chung is an Associate Professor of Chemical and Materials Engineering at the University of Alberta.  He received BSc from KAIST and PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. After graduation, he worked for three years as a senior engineer at Samsung Display in Korea, where he contributed in developing prototype large-area OLED TVs, followed by a postdoctoral training on stretchable electronics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Currently, he leads the Soft Materials and Devices Lab, an interdisciplinary research program on understanding physicochemical properties of gels and elastomers with or without functional additives and reinforcements, as well as on translating fundamental understanding to energy and biomedical device applications. His significant contributions include key studies on the role of jamming nanoparticles in phase-separating polymer blends; his works on oxide semiconductors and wearable devices which have been highly recognized by international information display and flexible electronics communities.

His 68 peer-reviewed papers and 11 patents were cited over 10,000 times (h-index 35). He is a recipient of the 2015 Hanwha Co. Non-Tenured Faculty Award. He has supervised 5 PhD students, 14 MSc students and 4 PDFs over 8 years of his professorship.

Dr. Matthew Churchward is an Assistant Professor in Biology at Concordia University of Edmonton and coordinates research with Dr. Kathryn Todd of the Department of Psychiatry at University of Alberta.  

His research focuses on the relationship between glial cells and brain health, and the divergence of inflammation as either a repair mechanism or damage mechanism after injury to the brain.  Within the SMART Network Matthew is also interested in evaluating the biological response to both injuries and devices, and strategies to improve biocompatibility at the interface between implanted devices and the nervous system.

Dr. Christopher Dennison's research is in the area of biomechanics and biomedical instrumentation and focuses on understanding mechanisms of traumatic injury in contexts spanning civilian life, sports and defence. The application areas for this work are protection devices including head-gear and body armour. His group collaborates with professional sport leagues, protection equipment manufacturers, and defence scientists. 

Dr. Dennison is active in North American and International standards organizations that focus on engineered testing approaches for protective gear. Dr. Dennison is a member of the scientific review committee of the International Research Council on the Biomechanics of Injury. His group applies in vivo, ex vivo, in vitro and in silico approaches.

Dr. Sarah Dobrowolski is a clinician, scholar, and educator with a clinical focus on amputation and stroke rehabilitation. Academically, Dr. Dobrowlski works primarily from a critical qualitative research paradigm, and preferentially employ participatory, narrative, and arts-based research methods.

Her scholarship centers on howhealthism (Crawford, 1980) continues to manifest in and through health promotion and/in rehabilitation settings. Briefly, healthism is the preoccupation with health as a personal and moral responsibility; it diverts attention away from the social and structural antecedents of health and disease, and limits how we live and experience our lives more broadly. This is particularly salient for consideration in the rehabilitation context given that healthism encourages preference for normatively healthy – and able – bodies, thus simultaneously placing an unfavourable gaze upon those who are not normatively ‘healthy’ and/or ‘able.’ In this way, healthism is deeply related to ableism, which is discrimination against those who experience disability.

All this is to say, how does one promote health in and through rehabilitation contexts beyond the logics of healthism and ableism? How can rehabilitation practitioners better see into and act upon the structural factors that affect our patients' health? How can rehabilitation settings be places of resistance and renewal, toward a gentler and more generative world, for all? In sum, how do we move from a culture of healthism to one of wholeism?

These are the kinds of questions that drive Dr. Dobrowlski's work and scholarship. She invite prospective graduate students who are similarly interested in these questions to inquire about ongoing and potential research opportunities in the areas of critical health promotion, rehabilitation, and health professions education.

Dr. Lindsay Eales (pronouns: she/they) is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Kinesiology, Sport, and Recreation at the University of Alberta. Lindsay's research interests include: qualitative methodologies, particularly research-creation and arts-based research; mad studies, critical disability studies, disability justice and social justice; and trauma-informed practices that are intersectional, anti-pathologizing, anti-oppressive, and affirming. 

They are a registered occupational therapist (AB) with over 20 years of specialized training in inclusive arts and event production, including training with leading integrated and disability dance practitioners around the world. Lindsay is also committed to service work that centers social justice and meaningful engagements with equity, diversity, and inclusion. They work to mobilize art, including dance, performance, installation, and video, to create and share research knowledges in accessible, evocative, and transformative ways. 

Dr. Anastasia Elias is a Professor in the Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering. Her research interests are nanotechnology, microfabrication, biomaterials, and materials characterization. 

Dr. Elias leads the Elias Research Group. The Group engineers functional and responsive polymers and composites, and develops methods to process and pattern these materials on both the macro- and microscale. 

 Dr. Victor Ezeugwu is a Physical Therapist and Assistant Professor in the Department of Physical Therapy at the University of Alberta and a Research Affiliate with the Glenrose Rehabilitation Hospital, Edmonton, Alberta. 

His research focuses on biomarkers and wearable technologies to optimize neurorehabilitation. He also studies the physical- and social-environment correlates and determinants of movement behaviours in people with neurological and cognitive impairments, and the relationships between sleep, sedentary behaviour, physical activity, and health. 

Dr. Keith Fenrich is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Rehabilitation Medicine at the University of Alberta. 

His research focuses on the pathophysiology of spinal cord injury in relation to the dynamic cellular interactions that occur after spinal cord injury; promoting functional recovery after spinal cord injury using pharmacological approaches in combination with rehabilitative training to enhance therapeutic neuroplasticity; and developing new methods and devices to better study and administer rehabilitative training after spinal cord injury.

Dr. Fenrich has spun off 3 FT reach Inc. 

Dr. Giovanni Ferrara graduated in Medicine, at the University of Chieti, Italy. He received his specialist training in Respiratory Disease and his PhD in Experimental Medicine at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. He was a visiting researcher at the New York University, during his PhD. His work focused on immunology and new immunologic tests for tuberculosis, and on rare pulmonary disease.

He received the title of Associate Professor while he was working both clinically and in research at the Karolinska University Hospital and at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden. While in Sweden, he became the chairman of the Swedish Registry for Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis, an innovative platform with patient interface for the collection of patient reported outcome measures.

Currently, at the University of Alberta, he continues his research in TB and rare pulmonary disease. He has a special interest in the validating and implementing wearable devices and digital solutions in the treatment of respiratory diseases.  

Dr. Paul Forsythe is an Associate Professor in the Department of Medicine, Pulmonary Division, University of Alberta. Dr Forsythe obtained a PhD in Immunopharmacology at Queen’s University Belfast, UK. He then went on to pursue post-doctoral studies at the University of Alberta and McMaster University. Before joining faculty at the U of A, he was Associate Professor at McMaster University and Principal investigator at the McMaster Brain-Body Institute.

His research interests are in the area of psychoneuroimmunology; utilizing inter-disciplinary approaches to investigate crosstalk between components of the nervous, immune, and endocrine systems. His work addresses how this neuro-immune interactions influence diverse pathophysiological responses such as inflammation, allergic disease, and mood/behavioral disorders. He has a particular interest in the therapeutic potential of the vagus nerve as a mediator of signaling between peripheral adaptive systems and the central nervous system.

Dr. Richard Fox is originally from a farm in Ottawa Valley. He obtained his undergraduate degree in education at Queen’s University, medicine at University of Toronto, neurosurgery residency at University of Alberta ( U of A), and fellowship in spinal neurosurgery with Dr. Sanford Larson at the Medical College of Wisconsin.

Currently, he is a neurosurgeon and a clinical professor of surgery at the U of A and Chairman of Canadian Spine Research and Education Fund. He is also collaborating with SMART Network Director, Dr. Vivian Mushahwar on a functional spinal cord stimulation project. His other ongoing projects include development of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) compatible portable spinal traction board, and use of vibration for patency in cerebral spinal fluid (CSF) shunts and external drain systems. 

Dr. Fox's interests include surgical education, spinal cord injury, and medical device development, and unreliable old English motor vehicles. He is also a past President of the Canadian Spine Society.

After earning a PhD from Stanford, Dr. Russ Greiner worked in both academic and industrial research before settling at the University of Alberta, where he is now a Professor in Computing Science and the founding Scientific Director of the Alberta Innovates Centre for Machine Learning (now Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute), which won the ASTech Award for "Outstanding Leadership in Technology" in 2006. He has been Program Chair for the 2004 "International Conference on Machine Learning", Conference Chair for 2006 "International Conference on Machine Learning", Editor-in-Chief for "Computational Intelligence", and is serving on the editorial boards of a number of other journals.

He was elected a Fellow of the AAAI (Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence) in 2007, and was awarded a McCalla Professorship in 2005-06 and a Killam Annual Professorship in 2007. He has published over 200 refereed papers and patents, most in the areas of machine learning and knowledge representation, including 4 that have been awarded Best Paper prizes. The main foci of his current work are (1) bioinformatics and medical informatics; (2) learning and using effective probabilistic models and (3) formal foundations of learnability. 

Dr. Gosgnach is a Professor of physiology, expertise: Neural circuits composed of multiple interneuron cell types located in the central nervous system (CNS) are responsible for generating many simple rhythmic behaviors in mammals. 

The lab uses a molecular genetic approach to identify distinct populations of interneurons that comprise these circuits, anatomical techniques to investigate their network connectivity, and physiological/behavioral techniques to determine the specific function of these neural circuits during behavior. These studies provide key information regarding the development and function of neural circuits within the CNS, and may help to devise therapies aimed at enhancing function after brain/spinal cord injury.