Leadership Team

Ronald Triolo
Center Director

Dr. Ronald J. Triolo serves as the Executive Director of the Cleveland APT Center and is primarily responsible for all aspects of its administration. Dr. Triolo has 18 years of experience in the design, development and clinical testing of motor system neuroprostheses, as well as in the design and evaluation of myoelectrically controlled above-knee limb prostheses. Dr. Triolo is a recent recipient of a Research Career Scientist Award from the Rehabilitation R& D Service of the Department of Veterans Affairs, and is a tenured Associate Professor of Orthopaedics and Biomedical Engineering at Case Western Reserve University. Dr. Triolo has organized multicenter clinical trials of assistive technologies and is the author of over 48 peer-reviewed scientific papers and nine book chapters. He previously was an Associate Editor for both the Journal of Rehabilitation Research and Development and the IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering. His experience includes being an investigator and active member of the Executive Steering Committee of the Cleveland FES Center, the Board of Directors of the International FES Society, and the founding Board of “RePlay for Kids” - a non-profit organization dedicated to modifying and repairing toys adapted for children with physical disabilities.

Gilles Pinault, M.D. is responsible for identifying the medical and rehabilitation needs of veterans and communicating them to the investigators and Center leadership. He actively solicits input continuously from peers within the LSCDVAMC and CWRU medical communities, as well as the local and national professional consumers of technology. He is specifically charged with maintaining strong and productive linkages with all investigators, clinicians and medical consultants, and medical students.  Dr. Pinault is the Medical Director of the Surgical ICU and has 5 years of full-time service at the LSCDVAMC as a vascular surgeon.  He has served as Co-Investigator or Investigator on NIH, DoD, and VA grants, as well as numerous industrial-sponsored clinical trials.

Dustin Tyler
Director of Engineering Quality

Dustin Tyler, Ph.D. is responsible for the engineering quality operations, establishing a vision for the technology development and overseeing design controls and documentation procedures for adoption into the Quality System.  Dr. Tyler has more than four years of commercial experience in the medical device industry and is an expert in design controls and quality system management.  Dr. Tyler has been awarded 5 patents and has three currently pending.  He holds the appointment of Nord Distinguished Assistant Professor in the Department of Engineering at CWRU.  Dr. Tyler is an expert in neuroscience, neural interfacing, neural prostheses, and in the recipient of research awards from the VA merit Review program as well as the NIH and other external sponsors.

Margot Damaser & Christian Zorman
Directors of Research & Scientific Affairs

Margot Damaser, Ph.D. and Christian Zorman, Ph.D. manage the grant submission process; providing for high quality and competitive research submissions.  They identify new fudning opportunties for investigators, and simplify the grant submission process through institutional partners. These individuals affect the firection of the Center, direct communication with investigators, and are conduits for Center interactions with local institutions (i.e. the Cleveland Clinic) and institutional partners (i.e. CWRU).  They serve as APT liasions on the VA Research & Development (R&D) Committee and to the Case School of Engineering.  They represent the concerns of all other APT Investigators to the management team at the biweekly Leadership meetings.  As APT Co-Investigators they demonstrate an in-depth understanding of project areas and seek new ways to promote scientific activities.  Drs. Damaser and Zorman lead the new Innovation Incentive Award program for the Center designed to solicit and assess new ideas for collaborative projects for pilot funding that will untimately lead to successful independent projects.

Dr. Damaser has an international reputation for her high-quality research aimed at investigating the mechanisms of uninary incontinence.  In 2000, Dr. Damaser was awarded a Presidental Early Career Award in Science and Engineering for outstanding research on the human urinary bladder using mathematical modeling along with physiological and neurological studies.  This is the highest honor bestowed by the United States Government on young professionals at the outset of their independent research careers.

Dr. Zorman has extensive expertise in the development of enabling materials for micro- and nanosystems.  In 2006 and 2007, Dr. Zorman was a NASA Summer Faculty Fellow and also won the NASAE Group Technical Achievement Award in 2004.  In 1989, he was the recipient of the Distinguished Graduate Teaching Award from CWRU.

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION

Brad Boggs provides core technical and administrative support of the concepts innovation division and is responsible for leading the technical evaluation team, which connects clinical needs with technical opportunities. Mr. Boggs oversees design reviews, enforces clinical design decisions and monitors progress of prototype manufacturing throughout all collaborating laboratories.