Professor Merryn Tawhai makes history today as she steps up to the helm as director of the Auckland Bioengineering Institute (ABI), the largest postgraduate research institute at Waipapa Taumata Rau, University of Auckland.
Professor Tawhai, an academic engineering scientist, was awarded the 2016 MacDiarmid Medal by the Royal Society of New Zealand (RSNZ) Te Apārangi, is a Fellow of the RSNZ, and a Fellow of IAMBE and AIMBE. She was director of the Medical Technologies Centre of Research Excellence (MedTech CoRE) from 2018–2021. She is also a director of Cure Kids Ventures.
Following her PhD in Engineering Science, she began as a research fellow under the inaugural director Distinguished Professor Hunter in 2002. She is one of a wave of senior scientists and engineers who have developed research careers completely under the umbrella of ABI. For the last 10 years, Professor Tawhai has supported the Institute as deputy director.
Since 2002 Professor Tawhai has led ABI’s Lung and Respiratory System Group with a multidisciplinary research programme in applied computational physiology of the respiratory system. Her research work focuses on developing mathematical models of the lung from the cellular level through to the whole organ to help understand the pathological changes that can occur in disease, and to develop new digital technologies to predict patient response to treatment.
Professor Tawhai says an exceptional team, a culture of openness and collegiality and a focus on impact from basic science through to applied science, clinical translation and commercialisation are factors to ABI’s ongoing success.
In the immediate future she says ABI is poised to leverage a surge of demand for digital technologies in healthtech which are attracting international research investment.
“With ABI’s stellar record of nearly thirty years of computational physiology and bioinstrumentation, we are in a prime position to leverage ourselves as the world leader in this space.”
“There is huge potential for digital humans to be transformative technology in healthcare. ABI is already the leader in infrastructural capability to enable digital humans to be more than a concept and actually happen. This is a unifying whole-of-institute initiative.”
