Keynote Speakers

Title of talk: Data-Driven Approaches to Advance Clinical Care in Spinal Cord Injury

Catherine Jutzeler is a group leader and data scientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich). 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. She was then awarded with several postdoctoral fellowships (Craig H. Nielsen, Michael Smith Research Foundation, International Research for Paraplegia) to conduct her postdoctoral studies in the field of neuro-pharmacoepidemiology and data science at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Since 2020, Dr. Jutzeler is leading her own research group in the Machine Learning and Computational Biology Laboratory at the ETH Zurich. Her group’s research lies at the intersection of medicine, epidemiology, and data science, with a particular focus on applications in modelling disease progression, biomarker discovery, and drug repurposing. Dr. Jutzeler and her team have received multiple research grants from national and international funding agencies, including the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Wings for Life Foundation.

Dr. Charles Tator trained in Neurosurgery and Neuropathology and was the first Dan Chair of Neurosurgery, at the University of Toronto. He headed Neurosurgery at the Toronto Western Hospital, and was a founder of ThinkFirst, Canada, a national brain and spinal cord injury prevention foundation, and Parachute Canada, a national injury prevention agency.

He is a Professor of Neurosurgery at the University of Toronto where he has held two research chairs. He invented the clip compression injury model of the rodent spinal cord, the first small animal model. He initiated the STASCIS trials of early spinal cord decompression in SCI patients. He is an Officer of the Order of Canada, and an inductee of the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame and the Canadian Sports Hall of Fame. Currently, he is a Scientist in the Krembil Brain Institute.

He has received awards from the Canadian Paraplegic Association, Canadian Brain Injury Coalition, USA Hockey, Hockey Canada and the American Spinal Injuries Association. His book on Catastrophic Injuries in Sports and Recreation was published by the University of Toronto Press, and he is the author of 439 publications in peer review journals. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Neurotrauma and the Neuroscientist.

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