Personal Info
- Country of residence: Canada
Information
Vivian Mashhour is a Palestinian - Canadian biomedical engineer , Professor of Functional Restoration Research at the University of Alberta , Canada, and a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences and the American Institute for Biomedical and Biomedical Engineering.
Her life
Vivian Mashhour was born in Jerusalem , Palestine, the second of three children. Vivian Mashhour attended Brigham Young University, where she earned a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering , and then earned a Ph.D. from the University of Utah . During her undergraduate career, Vivian Mashhour focused on learning mathematics , physics, and computer programming , but chose to pursue human applications as a career after realizing that her skills could benefit many people living in areas suffering from political conflict and war, and those suffering from spinal cord injuries . Vivian Mashhour therefore pursued postdoctoral research in rehabilitation medicine at Emory University and neuroscience at the University of Alberta.
Her career
After receiving a postdoctoral fellowship, Vivian Mashhour joined the faculty at the University of Alberta because of the funding and interaction her interdisciplinary research combined with engineering and neuroscience, and she went on to oversee two laboratories for spinal cord injury and neurology research and human rehabilitation engineering to restore limb function after spinal cord injuries. During her early tenure at the university, Mashhour was able to co-develop a device that augments weak nerve signals to the spinal cord to allow paraplegics to walk. Mashhour was successful in obtaining funding from the Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research to support her research for five years while transitioning from animal experiments to humans. The goal of the device was to allow electrical stimulation of damaged nerves in the spinal cord to produce muscle movement.
Vivian Mashhour has also developed a prototype of smart electronic underwear, a custom-made electrical underwear that helps prevent pressure ulcers or bed sores and continuous smart circulation compression to prevent deep vein thrombosis and prevent circulatory problems. In 2013, Vivian Mashhour co-founded the Center for Neural Interfaces and Rehabilitation Neuroscience to assist her in her research on mobility issues.
Vivian Mashhour was also appointed Director of the Sensorimotor Adaptive Rehabilitation Technology Network, whose role was to oversee the development of smart medical devices and rehabilitation interventions to improve the quality of functional performance for people with neurological injuries and diseases. As a result of her research and academic achievements, Vivian Mashhour was also appointed Special Advisor in Functional Electrical Stimulation Technologies at Glenrose Rehabilitation Hospital.
In October 2018, Vivienne Mouchawar was appointed Canada Research Chair in Functional Restoration to support her research into restoring mobility to Canadians with spinal cord injury. The following academic year, Mouchawar was selected for a fellowship at the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences as a pioneer in the development of micro-implants to stimulate the spinal cord to restore standing and walking after paralysis.
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Achievements and Awards
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