Assistant Professor

BSc (Universidade de Caxias do Sul), MSc, PhD (University of Porto)

Nadja Bressan received a BS in Industrial Automation from Universidade de Caxias do Sul, Brazil, in 2005; MSc in Automation, Instrumentation and Control in 2007 and PhD (European Doctorate) in Biomedical Engineering in 2011 from Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto, Portugal.

She developed the first Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition system for total intravenous anesthesia using Target Controlled Infusion in the neurosurgery environment. For six years, she was a clinical researcher at the Anaesthesiology Department of Hospital Geral de Santo António in Porto, working regularly in the neurosurgery setting collaborating in clinical and animal research.

She joined Ontario Tech University and The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) in Toronto, for a collaborative research project from 2011 - 2014. Her postdoctoral research topic was physiological stream processing in real-time and retrospective analysis to support nosocomial infection, apnoea and intraventricular haemorrhage. In 2015, she became a Research Associate of the Neonatology Department at SickKids, where her research focused on the intersection between modelling neonatal physiology, developing decision support tools to assist physicians in the interpretation of physiological data, and translation of biomedical science into knowledge to be applied and disseminated for the benefit of premature infants.

In 2017, she was hired as Assistant Professor by the Faculty of Sustainable Design Engineering at the University of Prince Edward Island, PEI. Her research program is based on Veterinary Medicine Engineering and takes place in her lab, the MAB - Mechatronics Applied to Biomedicine. This novel field aims to improve therapeutics, animal care, and animal research developing models to replicate human and animal real-time data as digital twin, enabling learning and reasoning dynamically to improve decision-making of physicians, veterinarians, and scientists without exploiting animals.

As a South American Woman in engineering, she symbolizes, empathizes and exemplifies many of the challenges that exist within the modern education system. She believes promoting diversity goes well beyond improving gender equality and must include enabling opportunities for underrepresented minority students. As a professor, she utilizes all resources to inspire students to pursue studies in STEAM fields, whether through academic programs or through her diverse roles. She promotes environments with equal-opportunity environment that fosters respect and communication across gender, racial or other cultural communities.