Zimi Sawacha (Associate Professor)

Zimi Sawacha married and mother of 3 children. She earned a Master Degree in Mechanical Engineering (2000) and a PhD in Bioengineering (2007) at the University of Padova, with a thesis on bioengineering applied to diabetic foot prevention. She received the National Scientific Habilitation in 2017 (“09/G2, seconda Fascia”). In 2020 she received the title of Associate professor at the Departments of Information Engineering and of Medicine (University of Padova). Between 2007 and 2019 she has been adjunct professor of Biomechanics at the Bachelor Degree in Movement Science at the University of Padova, since 2007 (ongoing) she has been Professor of Biomechanics at the Master Degree in Movement Science (Scienze eTecniche dell’Attività Motoria Preventiva e Adattata) Science at the University of Padova and she is currently Professor of Bioengineering of Movement and Rehabilitation at both the Bachelor and Master Degree of Bioengineering. She is currently supervising 3 PhD students and 3 post docs and 2 research fellows at the Department of Information Engineering (University of Padova). She has been the supervisor of more than 100 thesis (including Bachelor and Master Degree in Bioengineering and/or Sport Science). She has been External Jury Member of the Doctoral School of Biomedical Sciences, Ku Leuven, Leuven, Belgium (2014), at the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Sheffield , UK (2019), at Department of Biomedical, Metabolic and Neuroscience, Reggio Emilia, Italy- PhD “Clinical and Experimental Medicine (2019) and at the Master of Applied Science, School of allied Health, College of Science, Health and Engineering, Latrobe University, Melbourne, Australia (2016).

She has been with the School of Bioengineering, University of Padova (2004- up to now). She has been involved in 3 national and 4 international projects. She is the PI of a patent for industrial invention (2017).

Her scientific production includes 40 papers published in peer-reviewed journals and more than 200 publications in international conference proceedings. Her research activity, in cooperation with national and international scientific institutions, mainly concerns the human movement analysis and biomechanics. Zimi’s research interests lie primarily in the area of foot biomechanics applied to diabetic foot prevention. This led her to develop, or use, new musculoskeletal models of the foot to investigates ways to stratify diabetic patients at risk for plantar ulcers. Other research interests include gait and posture analysis combined with surface electromyography applied to different pathologies (i.e. Diabetes, Parkinson Disease, Fragile-X Children, stroke, low back pain and TMJ alterations), Plantar Pressure Sensors Analysis, Markerless Motion Capture and Computer Vision, Data mining applied to biomechanics data, Sport Biomechanics with a special focus on ACL injury prevention.

She’s actually member of Interuniversity Centre of Bioengineering of the Human NeuroMusculoskeletal System. She is in the review panel members of more than 30 international journals.  She is member of the European Society of Movement Analysis for Adults and Children Board (ESMAC), she has been member of the Consensus Conference on Clinical Gait Analysis promoted by the SIAMOC society, and she has been in the Board of Siamoc between 2015-2019, and the Conference’s President of SIAMOC 2015 edition in Padova. She is also member of SIAMOC, iFAB, ISB, ESB. She received 4 Best Paper awards respectively at SIMFER 2010, MEIbioeng15 2015, Siamoc 2015, Esmac 2016 conferences.

She is co-founder (2017) of BBSoF s.r.l a start up of Padova University and PI of an Industrial Invention, ACL Quick check. In 2001 she worked as research fellow at Helen Hayes Hospital CRT (New York, USA) on a NIH grant. She worked one year as research fellow at Istituto Ortopedico Rizzoli (Bologna) in order to develop a new protocol for children’s gait analysis (Leardini et al 2017).

 

Contact: sawacha@dei.unipd.it