Guest Speaker
Gregory S. Fischer, Ph.D.
William Smith Dean’s Professor
Mechanical Engineering & Robotics Engineering
Director, PracticePoint@WPI
Worcester Polytechnic Institute

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Bio:  Dr. Gregory Fischer is the William Smith Dean’s Professor of Robotics Engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, with appointments in Mechanical Engineering & Biomedical Engineering. He received his PhD from Johns Hopkins University in Mechanical Engineering and an MS in Electrical Engineering where he was a member of the NSF Engineering Research Center for Computer Integrated Surgery (ERC-CISST). He is the Director of PracticePoint at WPI practicepoint.org, a Massachusetts state-funded medical device accelerator and R&D center for medical robotics and cyber-physical systems. PracticePoint comprises integrated advanced manufacturing capabilities co-located with point-of-practice clinical care settings located in an engineering setting, and is geared to advance healthcare in: Medical Cyber-physical Systems, Surgical Robots, Medical Imaging and Image-Guidance, Sensing, Actuation, and Control of Medical Devices, Wearable robotics, Advanced manufacturing for personalized healthcare, Cybersecurity for medical devices, Data analytics for clinical decision support. Dr. Fischer also leads the WPI Automation and Interventional Medicine Robotics Research Laboratory (AIM Lab: http://aimlab.wpi.edu) with research focus including: an MRI-compatible robotic system for live MR image-guided conformal ablation of deep brain tumors and other stereotactic neurosurgical interventions which is currently in pre-clinical trials, a robotic system for precision targeted MRI-guided prostate cancer biopsy which has been used in clinical trials, surgical robot autonomy and human-robot-interaction including development of a research interface for the daVinci surgical robot, wearable robotic devices for rehabilitation and assistance with activities of daily living including soft robotic upper limb orthoses and rigid lower limb exoskeletons, and social robots for providing therapy. He is also the co-founder of AiM Medical Robotics / www.aimmedicalrobotics.com which is commercializing an MRI-compatible neurosurgery robot for precision image-guided interventions.