Amir Manbachi,
Ph.D., M.Sc.
Dr. Manbachi is an Assistant Professor of Neurosurgery, Biomedical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical, and Computer Engineering, Anesthesiology, and Critical Care Medicine at Johns Hopkins University. He is the engineering co-PI on a $13.48M award from the Department of Defense and is responsible for the assembly of a world-class team of pioneers, including 70 individuals from the clinic, academia, and industry. He is the co-Director of the HEPIUS Innovation Labs at Johns Hopkins Medicine, focusing on the next generation of wearables and implantable medical ultrasound devices for spinal cord injury patients.
Education
B.Sc.; University of Toronto (Canada) (2008)
M.Sc.; University of Toronto (Canada) (2010)
Ph.D.; University of Toronto (Canada) (2015)
His research interests include applications of sound and ultrasound to various neurosurgical procedures. These applications include imaging the spine and brain, detection of foreign body objects, remote ablation of brain tumors, monitoring of blood flow and tissue perfusion, as well as other upcoming interesting applications such as neuromodulation and drug delivery. His pedagogical activities have included teaching engineering design, innovation, translation, and entrepreneurship as well as close collaboration with clinical experts in Surgery and Radiology at Johns Hopkins.
His doctoral work embodied the development of ultrasound-guided spine surgery. He obtained his Ph.D., from the University of Toronto, under the supervision of Dr. Richard S.C. Cobbold. Prior to joining Johns Hopkins, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (2015-16) and the founder and CEO of Spinesonics Medical (2012–2015), a spinoff from his doctoral studies.
Amir is an author on >30 journal articles, > 30 conference proceedings, > 10 inventions, a book entitled “Towards Ultrasound-guided Spinal Fusion Surgery” and an audiobook entitled "Handbook for Clinical Ultrasound.” He has mentored 170+ students, has so far been raised $15M of funding and his interdisciplinary research has been recognized by a number of awards, including the University of Toronto’s 2015 Inventor of the Year award, Ontario Brain Institute 2013 fellowship, Maryland Innovation Initiative, and Johns Hopkins Institute for Clinical and Translational Research's Career Development Award.
Dr. Manbachi has extensive teaching experience, particularly in the field of engineering design, medical imaging, and entrepreneurship (both at Hopkins and Toronto), for which he received the University of Toronto’s Teaching Excellence award in 2014, as well as Johns Hopkins University career center's award nomination for students' "Career Champion" (2018) and finally Johns Hopkins University Whiting School of Engineering's Robert B. Pond Sr. Excellence in Teaching Excellence Award (2018).