SCOSYM - Key Persons

Job Titles:

• Director of Centre for Biomechanics and Rehabilitation
• Professor

Nachiappan Chockalingam is the Director of Centre for Biomechanics and Rehabilitation Technologies at Staffordshire University and a Professor of Clinical Biomechanics within the School of Life Sciences and Education. He is a Fellow of Institute of Physics and Engineering in Medicine. He is also an Affiliate Professor at the Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Malta and a Visiting Professor at Sri Ramachandra University, India. He is a Chartered Engineer, a Chartered Scientist and a member of various professional organisations, who have been elected to the executive board in some of these international societies. His research interests span the general area of biomechanics and gait analysis with a special interest in Spine/ Scoliosis, foot and footwear biomechanics. Nachi is one of the Research Editors for Scoliosis, Associate Editors for Footwear Science and serves as the senior editorial board member for a number of other international journals, including Prosthetics and Orthotics International and the Foot. He also reviews for several international grant funding bodies and professional/ scientific journals.

Job Titles:

• Researcher

Dr. Schreiber is a researcher and clinician with a Ph.D. in Rehabilitation Science and a Postdoctorate in health outcomes research and knowledge synthesis methods completed at the University of Alberta, Canada. She is a certified Schroth scoliosis therapist and international Schroth instructor. She devoted her entire career to helping children and adults with spinal deformities through research and clinical practice. Dr. Schreiber's work provided important evidence on the effectiveness of the Schroth exercises for adolescents with idiopathic scoliosis, for which she received several prizes and awards. She is a co-chair of SOSORT Education Committee and a member of SOSORT Scientific Committee. She is appointed as an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Alberta, while running her private practice for conservative management of spinal deformities.

Dr Theodoros B. GRIVAS, MD, PhD Orthopaedic and Spinal surgeon, graduated the Medical School at "Aristotle" University of Thessaloniki, Central Macedonia, Greece. He completed his training in General Surgery, in Paediatric and Adult Orthopaedics and Traumatology in Greece and received the MD Diploma. He also received a PhD degree. He worked at the "University Hospital", Queen's Medical Centre, at Nottingham, "Harlow Wood" Orthopaedic Hospital, at Mansfield, UK, under Mr. JK Webb and Professor RG Burwell, at "Evangelismos" and "Thriasio" Hospital at Athens Greece. He is a member of the Hellenic Association of Orthopaedic Surgery and Traumatology and of numerous other scientific societies. He is a member and Traveling Fellow of both AAOS and SRS. He served as an IRSSD, SOSORT and Hellenic (Greek) Spine Society president. He completed several research projects, studied and implemented the School Screening program and established a National Training Center for school-screening examiners, published numerous peer-review articles and chapters in books and was invited to lecture on various general orthopaedic and spinal topics. He wrote or was the editor of 9 books, and 619 scientific (123 Medline indexed, see http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=grivas+t ) publications and presentations. He is scientific responsible/principal investigator or collaborator of 20 research projects, financed by Greek national or European sources (see also at https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Theodoros_Grivas/contributions ). He served as the Chief Editor of BMC open access "Scoliosis and Spinal Deformities" former "Scoliosis" journal and is member of editorial board or reader for several peer-review journals. Currently he is the Director of the Orthopaedic and Traumatology Department at "Tzaneio" General Hospital of Piraeus, Greece and member of the National Examination Committee for the specialty of Orthopaedics and Traumatology.

Job Titles:

• Chartered Professional Engineer
• Co - Founder of the Oxford Metrics Group Plc
• Visiting Professor at the Faculty of Health Sciences

Dr Tom Shannon is a chartered professional engineer with over 35 years of international, commercial experience as a practising biomedical engineer, medical physicist and computer scientist with a focus on clinical and machine vision applications applied to the analysis of human motion and shape. Tom is a co-founder of the Oxford Metrics Group plc headquartered in Oxford, and a Director of Vicon Motion Systems located in Oxford and Denver. He is a Fellow of the Institution of Engineers, Australia, College of Biomedical Engineering, of the Royal Society of Medicine and of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce. Tom is also a Visiting Professor at the Faculty of Health Sciences, Staffordshire University, researching the application of vision science to the measurement of cosmetic defect and physical capability among children diagnosed with Adolescent Idiopathic Scoliosis.

Job Titles:

• Certificated Prosthetist / Orthotist ( CPO Germany ) Senior Consultant and Clinical Specialist at AdViva GmbH Heidelberg, Germany

Axel Hennes, was one of the senior PT´s of the Asklepios Katharina Schroth clinic in Germany. Since 1990 he was in charge with the educational part of the Schroth method. He has mainly influenced the course system in Germany and started in 2008 as an international Schroth Senior Instructor to offer international Schroth courses in English language. Since that time he has developed the ISST program concentrating clearly on a conservative out-patient therapy approach. He is a member of the Sosort society since 2008 and is working more autonomous since 2015 together with a multidisciplinary team of scoliosis experts in the MVZ-Sobernheim, Germany. In this out-patient Scoliosis-Centre ISST-Schroth is part of the Spine Concept, developed for scoliosis patients as well as providing professional training for scoliosis experts.

Job Titles:

• Physical Therapist

Timothy Tin Yan Lee gained his BEng (2010) and MSc (2011) in Biomedical Engineering from The University of Hong Kong and The Chinese University of Hong Kong, respectively, and is now a PhD candidate with thesis submitted pending for viva and also a Research Associate in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. His research interest is 3D ultrasound imaging for adolescent idiopathic scoliosis (AIS), with his doctoral research focused on the analysis of the sagittal curvature of the spine of scoliosis patients. Using the novel 3D ultrasound imaging for spine, his recent work discovered the coupling effect between the coronal and sagittal curvatures and also confirmed the value of using the sagittal spinal profile for scoliosis curve progression. Currently he is working on the optimization of curvature measurement and three-dimensional analysis on curve progression of AIS patients using ultrasound, with the aim of providing clinical applications in the near future. Before starting his PhD study, Mr Lee have obtained an MPhil in biomedical engineering from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University in 2014, focusing on the effect of whole body vibration on spinal proprioception of healthy subjects and patients with low back pain.