Rate My Professor Benjamin Zwick

Dr. Benjamin Zwick is a Research Fellow in the School of Engineering at The University of Western Australia (UWA), within the Mechanical Engineering discipline. Born in Zürich, Switzerland, and educated in Perth, Western Australia, he earned a Bachelor of Engineering with Honours in Mechanical Engineering and a PhD in computational biomechanics from UWA. His research is influenced by industry experience in engineering and design, emphasizing practical solutions to complex problems. Zwick is dedicated to advancing healthcare accessibility through open science, open data, and open-source software and hardware for medical devices. He collaborates with multidisciplinary teams in the Intelligent Systems for Medicine Laboratory on biomedical engineering challenges.

Zwick's academic interests include computational science and biophysics for medicine, image-guided surgical planning and navigation for epilepsy and brain cancer, transcranial magnetic stimulation, cardiovascular disease, computational solid and fluid mechanics, electromagnetics, biomechanics, numerical methods such as finite element, meshless, and physics-informed neural networks, artificial intelligence, machine learning, medical image analysis, and high-performance computing. He has developed key open-source tools like SlicerCBM for biomechanical brain analysis, MVox, SofTiSim, and ExplicitSim, and contributed datasets including NeuriPhy for physics-informed learning and data for electrocorticography forward problems. Notable publications encompass 'Suite of meshless algorithms for accurate computation of soft tissue deformation for surgical simulation' (Medical Image Analysis, 2019), 'Simple and robust element-free Galerkin method with almost interpolating shape functions for finite deformation elasticity' (Applied Mathematical Modelling, 2021), 'Patient-specific solution of the electrocorticography forward problem in deforming brain' (NeuroImage, 2022), and 'Automatic framework for patient-specific modelling of tumour resection-induced brain shift' (Computers in Biology and Medicine, 2022). His PhD thesis is 'Numerical Methods and Software for Soft Tissue Simulations'. Zwick received the 2022 MFEM Workshop Visualization Award, an Emerging Leaders Grant from the WA Health & Medical Research Infrastructure Fund in 2025 for computational biophysics in epilepsy presurgical planning, and near-miss NHMRC Ideas Grants. He has served as a casual lecturer and unit coordinator for courses including Numerical Methods and Modelling (2024, 2016–2018), Biomechanics (2023–2024), and Finite Element Methods (2014–2016), contributing to UN SDG 3: Good Health and Well-being.