Laura Diment

Office location: Tonsley 5.06

Laura is a John Monash Scholar and engineering lecturer with a passion for developing technologies that help to address the UN Sustainable Development Goals. She works to improve quality of life for people with disabilities in remote and low-resourced regions, through assistive device design, and using technology to improve access to services. She also develops environmentally sustainable technologies for rural community living. Laura specialises in prosthetics, multiphysics simulation, body-sensor networks, signal processing, machine-learning and digital manufacturing.

Laura worked for the Medical Device Partnering Program at Flinders University, to prototype and clinically evaluate novel medical and assistive devices, then undertook her doctorate at the University of Oxford, developing a bioheat model of the heat-load on prosthesis-users during exercise and rest. She worked as a postdoc at Southampton University, training Cambodian student-prosthetists to use accelerometers and 3D scanners to monitor physical activity, community participation and prosthetic socket fit. She developed software to classify activity-type from accelerometers, worked on machine-learning for understanding good prosthetic socket fit, and developed a respirator for clinicians in the COVID-19 pandemic. She has worked in a research and teaching capacity with engineers, technicians, prosthetists and assistive-device-users in Australia, UK, Cambodia, India, Canada and Papua New Guinea. She is also founder and CEO of a start-up social enterprise that works in the environmental engineering space, developing sustainable housing communities.