Thilo graduated in Information Technology from the Technical University of Munich. He did a PhD in the field of pattern recognition at the Institute of Human-Machine Communication at Munich, followed by a two year postdoc at the International Institute of Computer Science, Berkeley, California. He then joined the Structure and Motion Lab at the RVC as a postdoctoral fellow and worked on BBSRC, HBLB and DEFRA funded projects investigating locomotion on compliant limbs, horse-surface interaction and automated lameness detection in dairy cattle.
In
2008 he became a Lecturer in Bio-Engineering in the Department of Veterinary
Clinical Sciences and was recently promoted to Senior Lecturer. He is now
focusing on applied locomotor biomechanics with an emphasis on objective
quantification of movement anomalies. Since being appointed Lecturer he has
concentrated on pioneering a multi-sensor GPS-enhanced gait analysis system for
field and clinical use. Use of this system has resulted in a number of
peer-reviewed articles covering sensor validation (Pfau et al, 2005), lameness
assessment (Pfau et al, 2007), back movement in horses (Warner et al, 2010) and
horse-jockey interaction (Pfau et al, 2009) to name a few and a growing number
of undergraduate student projects that are being brought to publication level
(e.g. Brocklehurst et al, 2013, Barstow et al, 2013, Brighton et al, 2013,
Arndt et al, 2013, Robertes et al, 2013, Pfau et al, 2012).