KTH

Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan

Institution :

Kungliga Tekniska högskolan (KTH), the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm is the largest and oldest technical university in Sweden.

The word Neuronics comes from a combination of neurotrauma and biomechanics. The research at the Division of Neuronic Engineering (NE) aims at increasing the knowledge of injuries to the nervous system and how to prevent them. The Division of Neuronic Engineering has played an active part in the international work to initiate exchange of knowledge in the biomechanical field since 1995.

Today, NE has two professors, one associate professor, four assistant professors and four PhD students. The objective of the research is to combine knowledge within technology and medicine aimed at the improvement of prevention, diagnosis and treatment of injury to the nervous system of the human being.
We have been working with the development of Finite Element models of the neck and head for over fifteen years. These models have been used for injury prediction and prevention with good results and the development has been continuous to keep the models “state of the art” in the world.

Role in the project:

KTH will contribute to RTD work packages WP1 and WP2. The main focus for KTH in WP1 will be the integration of improved head and neck segments in order to obtain full body models for 3 and 6 years old children. The main contribution to WP2 from KTH will be to assess the evolutions of material and local geometrical parameters as a function of age (or other global metric) using literature surveys. Doctoral students Chiara Giordano, and Victor Strömbäck Alvarez will together with, Xiaogai Li, Johnson Ho and Svein Kleiven mainly work in tasks 1.3, 1.4, 2.1 and 2.2.

Team:

Professor Svein Kleiven has more than 15 years of experience in continuum mechanics, dynamic, non-linear FEA, and head injury biomechanics. He has a PhD in Biomechanics, B.Sc. in Automotive Eng., M.Sc. in Mechanical Eng. and in 2013 was appointed as Professor by KTH. He is Director of Doctoral Programs in Technology and Health and Applied Medical Engineering at KTH and Director of a Joint Doctoral Program between Karolinska Institute and KTH in Medical Technology. He has been the principal supervisor for 2 PhDs and over 30 MSc theses. He is currently advising two postdocs, four PhDs and two MSc's. He is editorial board member for ISRN Biomedical Engineering, Associate editor of Frontiers in Biomechanics, Scientific Review Committee member for IRCOBI, and a regular reviewer for the main journals in the research area such as J. Biomechanics and Medical Engineering and Physics and has acted as an external examiner in the evaluation of 12 PhD theses since 2008 in The Netherlands, Belgium, Ireland,  Singapore and Sweden. He will dedicate 3-6 man-months to this research endeavour, a percentage of 5-10% of his full-time employment at KTH. So far the scientific publications have attracted 1052 citations (May 2014) of more than 60 scientific articles in peer reviewed journals and proceedings and he has more than 20 invited or key-note lectures.   

Peter Halldin, PhD in biomechanics has more than 15 years of experience in dynamic FEA of the head and cervical spine, biomechanics, and helmet design. Dr. Halldin, who is a world leading helmet researcher, was also President, and is currently a development manager for a company that aims to commercialize a new helmet concept (MIPS) since 2001.
Dr. Xiaogai Li is currently a post-doc at Dallas Univ. Texas, USA. Before this, she worked 1.5 years as a researcher at Karolinska University Hospital and before that at the department of Neuronics at KTH after obtaining her doctorate degree at the same institute in 2012.

Two young, talented and knowledgeable doctoral students, Victor Strömbäck Alvarez (MSc Eng., man born 1984), and Chiara Giordano (MSc Eng. Cum laude, woman born 1988) are working on the PIPER project as well.