The appointment
Prof Ashish Gupta has been appointed the inaugural Professor of Practice in the Faculty of Engineering at Queensland University of Technology.
What the role involves
The position is part-time and concerns the faculty's research programmes and its industry collaborations in biomedical engineering. It allows him to continue his existing roles at QUASR and the ARC Industrial Transformation Training Centre for Joint Biomechanics.
A Professor of Practice appointment is designed to bring clinical practice and engineering research closer together. In shoulder surgery that overlap is substantial: implant design, component positioning and the mechanics of how a joint loads are engineering questions with direct clinical consequences.
Affiliations: QUT, The University of Queensland, QUASR, the ARC Training Centre for Joint Biomechanics and St Andrew's War Memorial Hospital.
Why a clinician inside an engineering faculty
A Professor of Practice is appointed for experience accumulated in practice rather than for an academic record alone, and the purpose of the role is to keep research anchored to problems that actually arise in the work. Engineering groups can model a joint with great precision, but deciding which question is worth modelling needs someone who operates. Equally, a surgeon who sees an implant behaving unexpectedly needs engineers to work out why.
Joint biomechanics and what it studies
Biomechanics is the study of the forces acting on the body and how its structures respond to them. The shoulder is a useful subject because it is the most mobile joint in the body and gains that range by sacrificing bony constraint, relying instead on muscles and soft tissue to hold the ball in a shallow socket. That arrangement makes the mechanics of a shoulder replacement unusually sensitive to how the components are positioned: the geometry decides how far the arm can be raised before it catches, and how force is transmitted into the bone around the implant. Industrial Transformation Training Centres are an Australian Research Council programme that trains researchers jointly with industry partners, which in this field means implant manufacturers and clinical units working on the same questions. Individual results vary.