Emily Y. K. Chan

I am a PhD candidate in the HEAD Lab at the Dyson School of Design Engineering, Imperial College London since November 2022.

I work at the intersection of brain science, sports science, and engineering, studying traumatic brain injury caused by sports impacts. My PhD research is funded by Sports and Wellbeing Analytics (SWA), a forward-thinking company in wearable technology. I like work that connects science with real-world impact, especially when engineering tools can help us better understand and prevent brain injury in sport.

Also proudly a cat mom to Cream.

news

Apr 30, 2026	Short communication about subject-specific brain strain prediction accepted for IRCOBI 2026.
Apr 15, 2026	Our work on comparing brain injury metrics across sports has been accepted for presentation at ISBS 2026 at Loughborough University.
Feb 26, 2026	Multiple abstracts accepted at WCB 2026!
Feb 24, 2026	I gave a talk at the Sports Engineering Seminar Day at Heriot-Watt University, where I shared our recent work in sports biomechanics.
Jan 23, 2026	I was invited by Prof Mike Loosemore, MBE to give a presentation at the inaugural Concussion Working Group meeting at ISEH about using biomechanics model to study brain injury.

selected publications

medRxiv

Choosing Brain Injury Metrics for Sports HIA: A Multi-Sport Strain Evaluation Study

E. Y. K. Chan, E. Koumantou, L. Low, and 6 more authors

medRxiv, 2026

DOI Bib

@article{chan2026braininjurymetrics,
  author = {Chan, E. Y. K. and Koumantou, E. and Low, L. and Siy, I. and Jones, C. M. and Austin, K. and Loosemore, M. and McDonald, S. J. and Ghajari, M.},
  title = {Choosing Brain Injury Metrics for Sports HIA: A Multi-Sport Strain Evaluation Study},
  journal = {medRxiv},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.64898/2026.06.30.26356946},
}

bioRxiv

PARS: an automated, open-source pipeline for subject-specific finite element head modelling from MRI

V. Darvishi, E. Y. K. Chan, H. Duckworth, and 3 more authors

bioRxiv, 2026

DOI Bib

@article{darvishi2026pars,
  title = {PARS: an automated, open-source pipeline for subject-specific finite element head modelling from MRI},
  author = {Darvishi, V. and Chan, E. Y. K. and Duckworth, H. and Parker, T. D. and Sharp, D. J. and Ghajari, M.},
  journal = {bioRxiv},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.64898/2026.07.05.736584},
}

EAAI

Balancing efficiency and accuracy: Extreme gradient boosting and neural networks for near real-time brain deformation prediction in sports collisions

E. Y. K. Chan, X. Yu, C. Qin, and 1 more author

Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, 2025

DOI Bib

@article{chan2025balancing,
  title = {Balancing efficiency and accuracy: Extreme gradient boosting and neural networks for near real-time brain deformation prediction in sports collisions},
  author = {Chan, E. Y. K. and Yu, X. and Qin, C. and Ghajari, M.},
  journal = {Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence},
  volume = {162},
  pages = {112489},
  year = {2025},
  doi = {10.1016/j.engappai.2025.112489},
  publisher = {Elsevier},
}