Extras! More on our speaker
FiB 2026 has the pleasure of welcoming Dr. Dena Shahriari as our keynote speaker this year.
​
Dena Shahriari is an Assistant professor at the department of Orthopaedics and the School of Biomedical Engineering at the university of British Columbia in Vancouver as well as a principal investigator at the International Collaborations on Repair Discoveries (ICORD). Dr. Shahriari has a BS from the University of California Berkeley and later received her PhD from the University of Michigan where she developed axon guidance scaffolds for bridging the sciatic nerve and the spinal cord. Part of her PhD work in currently in clinical trials for sciatic nerve repair. She then continued with postdoctoral training at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with Dr. Polina Anikeeva’s bioelectronics laboratory before establishing the BioAugmentative Interfaces laboratory at UBC/ICORD in 2021. The laboratory is at the intersection of materials science, electrical engineering and medicine where the team develops smart biomaterials for tissue modulation, augmentation and/or repair.
​
Learn more about the team’s on-going efforts and publications at the lab website at: https://bioauglab.med.ubc.ca/.
Keynote | Dr. Dena Shahriari
Optoelectronic devices and smart biomaterials for spinal cord and bladder modulation​
​
Smart biomaterials and bioelectronics are rapidly emerging in different medical applications. In this talk, we will discuss how these fields are being studied at our laboratory of the BioAugmentative Interfaces particularly to benefit those living with spinal cord injury (SCI). Depending on the severity and the level of injury, SCI can result in the loss of sensory and motor function as well as different organ dysfunction with the loss of bladder control remaining as one of the most unmet needs. We will first discuss our latest neuromodulation implant for the long-term goal of better understanding the brain-spinal cord neural circuitry and the goal of improving sensory and motor function after SCI. The devices are developed for the spinal cord modulation of rodents via the use of light and transgenes (termed optogenetics). They are fully implantable, battery-powered and wirelessly rechargeable and enable the months-long optical modulation of one or multiple levels of the spinal cord. Next, we will extend the conversation to the use of smart biomaterials to assist with user-controlled micturition – one of the most unmet needs of many living with different neurological injuries and conditions. We are developing an on-demand micturition system composed of an elastomeric sensor and actuator secured over the bladder wall in rodents connected to an implanted control module. The bladder level is continuously detected by the sensor and is communicated to an external Bluetooth module, which can then enable the actuator activation and therefore initiate on-demand micturition.
A preview of the keynote presentation...
A previous TEDx talk given by our keynote speaker, Dr. Dena Shahriari