Brian Davies is an Emeritus Professor of Medical Robotics at Imperial College London, where he has been since 1983, and is also a senior research investigator there. He has a PhD in Medical Robotics and was awarded a DSc. in 2001 for his international contribution to Robotic and Computer Aided Surgery systems. He has over 250 refereed papers. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2005 and serves on their focus group on Medical Technology & on the Community of Practice in Biomedical Engineering. He developed the world’s first special-purpose surgical robot called PROBOT, to remove quantities of prostatic tissue from a human patient in a clinical trial in April 1991.
He subsequently developed the concept of Active Constraints particularly applied to orthopaedic robots and in 1999 he was a co-founder of the spin-off company ACROBOT limited, who developed robots for MIS hip and knee joint replacement and he was their Technical Director until the company was acquired in 2010 by Stanmore Implants Worldwide, which in turn was bought by Mako Ltd and then by Stryker Ltd in 2013. He is a founder of the new “Technologies in Medicine” section of the Royal Society of Medicine. He is on the Board of the IMechE Engineering in Medicine & Health Division. 2001-2014 he has been program chair for the annual conference of the International Society for Computer Aided Orthopaedic Surgery (CAOS) and is on their Executive Board. 2000-2013 he has chaired the Scientific Advisory Board for the Co-Me Swiss research organisation. From 2006-2019 he has been a consultant advising on Medical Robots for the Advanced Robotics Group of the Italian Institute of technology in Genoa.
He participated in the EU medical robotics project ACTIVE and its predecessor ROBOCAST, and is a regular reviewer for EU FP7 projects. In July 2012 he gave the Peiyang prestigious lecture in Tianjin, China. In July 2013 he gave invited Keynote talks on robotic surgery to the CAOS Asia conference in Cairns, Australia. From 2013-2016 he Chaired the Strategic Advisory Board for the Leeds HTC in Colorectal Cancer group and, 2013-2016, the DFG German Research Foundation funded “Cognitive Surgery” research project. He gave Keynote talks at the British Council workshop on Medical Robotics, Abu Dhabi, The Point Robotics Meeting in Taipei, the CRAS conference in Pisa, the Hamlyn Symposium Workshop on rehabilitation robotics in London, the UCL, London, meeting on Medical Robotics and the IET, London, meeting on Robotic Surgery. In 2015 he was awarded the International Society of Technology in Arthroplasty (ISTA) life-time achievement award for research into the use of Robots in Surgery.