Thor F. Besier

Thor is a Professor at the Auckland Bioengineering Institute and has a joint appointment with the Department of Engineering Science at the University of Auckland. He completed his PhD in musculoskeletal biomechanics at The University of Western Australia in 2000 and was a postdoctoral fellow in the Bioengineering Department at Stanford University from 2003 to 2006. Thor established Stanford's Human Performance Laboratory as the Director of Research and was a faculty member in the Department of Orthopaedics at Stanford from 2006 to 2010, before returning home to New Zealand in 2011. Thor’s research combines medical imaging with computational modelling to understand mechanisms of musculoskeletal injury and disease. Current projects include the development of gait retraining technology and population modelling to test orthopaedic implants. He has published >160 scientific articles on these topics and has received grant funding from the NZ Marsden Fund and MBIE, the US Food & Drug Administration (FDA), the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), Australian Research Council and the Australian National Health & Medical Research Council. Thor has spun-out two companies from his research, including IMeasureU (inertial sensing for human movement) and FormusLabs (orthopaedic pre-operative planning).