RESC welcomes newly elected members Dr Catherine Jutzeler, Dr Diego Paez
ETH Zurich’s Competence Centre for Rehabilitation Engineering and Science (RESC) is pleased to welcome its newly elected members Catherine Jutzeler and Diego Paez.
Catherine Jutzeler was appointed Assistant Professor of Biomedical Data Science at the ETH Zurich in 2022. After completing her BSc and MSc in Pharmaceutical Science, she pursued her doctoral studies jointly at ETH Zurich and the University Clinic Balgrist, applying neurophysiological and neuroimaging methods to assess the neural plasticity in patients recovering from spinal cord injury. Thereafter, she conducted her postdoctoral studies in the field of Neuro-Pharmacoepidemiology and Data Science at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.
In 2019, she was awarded the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) Ambizione grant to lead her own research group. The group’s research aims to identify causes, risk factors, and biomarkers of neurological disease progression, including Alzheimer’s disease, spinal cord injury, and traumatic brain injury. At the core of her work is a series of prospective and retrospective investigations that integrate genetic, biochemical, clinical assessments, and medication history with both traditional epidemiological approaches and machine-learning algorithms.
Diego Paez is the Head of the Spinal Cord Injury Artificial Intelligence (SCAI) Lab at the Swiss Paraplegic Center in Nottwil. The lab, established in 2022, focuses on prognosis, sensing and modelling for personalised health care of patients with a spinal cord injury. Diego Paez obtained a PhD in Bioengineering and Robotics from Tohoku University, Japan in 2017. His research focuses on physical and cognitive human modelling, control for human-robot interaction, soft-robot design, and control with human-in-the-loop. He conducted his Postdoctoral studies in assistive robotics from 2017 to 2018 at the Artificial Intelligence Lab at the University of Tsukuba in Japan and in human sensing and modelling for robot control from 2019 to 2021 at the Learning Algorithms and System Lab at EPFL (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne).
He is a grantee of the Toyota Mobility Unlimited Challenge (2018 and 2019), which lead to the start-up Qolo Inc., a company innovating personal mobility solutions and rehabilitation equipment for lower-body impairments. Diego is highly passionate about modelling the human body and achieving a digital twin to improve prognosis, build novel technologies, and assist healthcare workers and caregivers.
The multidisciplinary expertise of the newly elected members is a valuable asset to ETH Zurich’s Rehabilitation Initiative.
The Rehab Initiative’s mission is to improve the quality of life and participation of people with physical disabilities; thus contributing towards a more inclusive society. With its Competence Centre RESC, which is a nexus of expertise from academia, hospitals, industry, government, healthcare, disability organisations, and other NPOs, it promotes exchange, interdisciplinary research projects, innovative education programmes, and knowledge transfer.