Madeleine Lowery is a Professor in the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University College Dublin. Her research is focused on using engineering methods to understand the human nervous system as it relates to movement, in health and disease, and to design therapies and technologies to improve impaired motor function. She leads an interdisciplinary research team in the area of Neuromuscular Systems and Neural Engineering. Her research interests include electromyography, bioelectromagnetics, myoelectric control of artificial limbs, electrical stimulation, deep brain stimulation and neural control of movement.
Between 2000 and 2005, Dr Lowery was a Postdoctoral Fellow then Research Assistant Professor at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago and the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Northwestern University. She received the B.E. and Ph.D. degrees from the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, University College Dublin, in 1996 and 2000, respectively. She is a member of the IEEE and a member of the Council of the International Society of Electrophysiology and Kinesiology (ISEK). She is a Funded Investigator in the SFI Insight Centre for Data Analytics and the CURAM Centre for Research in Medical Devices. In January 2015 she was awarded a Consolidator grant by the European Research Council.
‘Engineering the Human Body: from bionics and exoskeletons to brain-computer interface’, June 2019.
In the 1970’s The Six Million Dollar Man launched the idea of bionics into the popular imagination and other scifi heroes such as Ironman have also gained powers from machine-body interface. In both these cases: Steve Austin, the Bionic Man and Tony Stark, Iron Man the technologies were used to repair catastrophic injuries but following repair they both gained superpowers. Technologies and therapies are being engineered to assist the disabled and infirm. These include robotic prostheses, bionic eyes, exoskeletons, electronic nerve implants and brain-computer interfaces. These technologies may someday find applications in everyday life, enhancing human performance and of course will also have military applications.