David Dean has stories.
Of walking into a lab at the Cleveland Natural History Museum as an undergraduate student and seeing the bones of the famous “Lucy” Australopithecus fossil skeleton laid out on a table. Of later, as a new faculty member at Case Western Reserve University, driving loads of human skulls from the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. to Cleveland to be CT scanned. Of having nightmares where the skull implants he’d designed and begun to 3D print based on those scans wouldn’t fit during surgeries on patients.
A long career can lead to long stories. “My wife likes to say, ‘Who put a quarter in him?’” he jokes.
Three decades of groundbreaking work offers plenty of material. In addition to creating the first patient-specific computer-aided design (CAD) system and CAD-derived skull implants, Dean patented the first resorbable polymer system for 3D printing tissue-engineered bone scaffolds. A decade later, he helped invent a resorbable magnesium alloy that he and colleagues are validating for use in skeletal fixation plates and other medical devices.
He’s got plenty of other projects in the works, too. And they’ve all come to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which he joined as a professor of biomedical engineering in fall 2025.
Dean arrives in Madison after spending the past 12 years at Ohio State University and nearly 20 before that at Case Western Reserve. He joins his wife, UW-Madison Vice Chancellor for Research Dorota Grejner-Brzezinska, who’s also a professor of electrical and computer engineering.
“I see great potential for collaboration with folks at Wisconsin, as well as really good resources in terms of core facilities and programs in the hospital and the medical school,” says Dean, who has previously held primary appointments in neurological surgery (Case Western Reserve) and plastic surgery (New York University and Ohio State) departments. Beginning in graduate school, he collaborated closely with clinicians on improving therapies, especially those used for skeletal reconstructive surgery.
In addition to his wealth of experience, Dean brings with him a major role in the National Science Foundation-supported HAMMER (Hybrid Autonomous Manufacturing, Moving from Evolution to Revolution) Engineering Research Center. Dean has led one of the five-year, $26 million national center’s testbeds, focused on point-of-care manufacturing of medical devices. UW-Madison recently joined the HAMMER-ERC.
Dean and his HAMMER collaborators have created a robot called the Robotic Skeletal Fixation Shaper (informally dubbed the “Bendy Bot”). Their team uses data from 3D CT scans to create a virtual surgical plan that provides a final skeletal fixation plate shape and instructions to the robot to reshape an off-the-shelf metal skeletal fixation plate ahead of a surgery. Currently, surgeons must manually bend most metal fixation plates until they fit the intended location—a taxing and time-consuming activity.
“If you have a smashed face, with lots of pieces of bones that were traumatically separated, that needs to be fixed pretty quickly,” says Dean. “If we could use a CT scan to plan all of this ahead of time, and then just bend all the plates on a machine in a few seconds rather than hours, I think we have a game changer.”
Dean is applying some of the same technology to “percutaneous, osseointegrated” implants for above-the-knee prosthetics that would allow amputees more control over their movement and dramatically improved stability compared to current state-of-the art socketed implants. Percutaneous, osseointegrated implants are attached directly to the patient’s remaining thigh bone and then pass through the patient’s skin to directly connect with a prosthetic limb.
Dean’s lab is also exploring 3D printing of tissue-engineered scaffolds using many novel techniques, including an emerging polymer fiber-weaving technique known as melt electrowriting. For example, his team has presented melt electrowriting textile scaffolds that show promise for corneal regeneration.
It’s all the culmination of a curiosity that first sparked in a vertebrate anatomy course during the second semester of his junior year as an undergraduate student at Case Western Reserve.
“I loved the course. I was curious, but I wasn’t expecting to love it,” he says. “The instructor inspired me with rich examples of how anatomical form follows function across species. I decided I needed to learn more.”