Annie Simon Email & Phone Number

- Successfully manages several cross-functional teams on multiple grants and projects designed to improve the mobility and function of individuals with an amputation.- Manages a 5-year $3.5 million dollar grant with the goal of investigating if a surgical technique can improve individuals’ control of a multi-articulating hand prosthesis. Responsibilities involve managing clinical staff to monitor compliance and track surgical outcomes, electrical engineers to ensure software reliability, and biomedical engineers to measure study data. Successfully coordinates 4 sites-of-care and leads ongoing brainstorming sessions to mitigate current and anticipated timeline and budget issues.- Oversees project goals for two multi-million dollar grants to create a neural control system for powered leg prostheses. Specific responsibilities include leading user testing on hardware and software control enhancements, designing protocols to test for functional improvements in prosthesis control, analyzing mechanical and biological signal data, and writing and editing scientific documents.- Continually trains new staff and students on best practices in research.- Exceptional oral and written communication and ability to convey state-of-the-art research in both highly-technical and layman’s terms.- Conducted invited presentations for various engineering and clinical departments, scientific and medical conferences, and philanthropic events.- 20+ published manuscripts, many in high-impact journals including the Journal of the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine. - Well established analytical problem solving and troubleshooting skills used daily to maintain usability and functionality of state-of-the art prototype devices and custom software.- Developed and validated custom algorithms to improve functional use of robotic legs during stair climbing and other activities of daily living.

- Mentors engineering graduate students including serving on dissertation committee and co-advising students on best-practices for data collection and analysis, project and task management for successful completion of their masters or PhD study, and written and oral communication to convey their results in high-impact journals.- Continuously serves research community by serving as a manuscript reviewer for 20+ different engineering and clinical journals and conferences.

Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago became the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab in March 2017.

- Developed intelligent control strategies to reduce the configuration time of powered lower limb prostheses for transfemoral amputees. - Designed experimental protocols to test whether or not the powered prostheses can improve the kinematics and kinetics of individual with a transfemoral amputation over their passive, home prosthesis.

- Developed a virtual reality environment performance test to measure quality of upper limb myoelectric control that can be used to a wide variety of control systems (e.g., conventional direct control, pattern recognition control) and control parameters (e.g., different classification algorithms, pre- and post-processing techniques, etc).- Researched and published work showing that the settings used to configure upper limb pattern recognition myoelectric control systems can dramatically influence the controllability of the physical prostheses.

Phd, Biomedical Engineering

- Secured 5 years of pre-doctoral funding from two national funding agencies (National Science Foundation and American Heart Association)..

M.S.E., Mechanical Engineering

B.S., Biomedical Engineering