Thor Franciscus Besier BPhEd, PhD

Thor is an Associate Professor at the Auckland Bioengineering Institute and has a joint appointment with the Department of Engineering Science at the University of Auckland. He completed his PhD in musculoskeletal biomechanics at The University of Western Australia in 2000 and was a postdoctoral fellow in the Bioengineering Department at Stanford University from 2003 to 2006. Thor established Stanford's Human Performance Laboratory as the Director of Research and was a faculty member in the Department of Orthopaedics at Stanford from 2006 to 2010, before returning home to New Zealand in 2011.

Thor’s research combines medical imaging with computational modelling to understand mechanisms of musculoskeletal injury and disease. In particular, he is interested in the mechanical aetiology of patellofemoral pain, achilles tendinopathy and osteoarthritis and novel technologies to diagnose and treat these disorders. He has published more than 75 scientific articles on these topics and currently receives funding from the Royal Society of NZ Marsden Fund, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the NZ Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment (MBIE), the Australian Research Council (ARC), and the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (NH and MRC).