Organizing Committee

Erika Ross Ellison, Ph.D., is the Vice President of Global Clinical Regulatory and Quality at ONWARD Medical, developing therapies for spinal cord injuries. She has held leadership roles at Abbott Neuromodulation and Cala Health and served as an assistant professor at the Mayo Clinic.

Yasemin M. Akay, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor at the University of Houston’s Department of Biomedical Engineering. Her research includes high-throughput screening of novel cancer drugs and studying the effects of maternal nicotine and alcohol exposures on dopamine neurons. She aims to personalize cancer treatments through in vitro and in vivo studies.

Natalie Mrachacz-Kersting, Ph.D., is a neuroscientist and Director of the Institute at the University of Freiburg, Germany. Her research focuses on neurorehabilitation technology and has received multiple prestigious grants and awards. She has authored over 80 peer-reviewed manuscripts and is involved in several scientific committees and journals.

May Dongmei Wang, Ph.D., is the Wallace H. Coulter Distinguished Faculty Fellow and a professor at Georgia Tech, specializing in Biomedical Big Data and AI-Driven Health Informatics. She has published over 270 journal articles and delivered over 280 invited lectures. Dr. Wang holds several fellowships and chairs multiple committees within IEEE and ACM.

Michela Chiappalone, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Bioengineering at the University of Genova, focusing on neuroprosthetics and neurorehabilitation. She has led significant research projects, authored numerous scientific papers, and served as an IEEE EMBS Distinguished Lecturer. She also holds an affiliated researcher position at Rehab Technologies IIT.

Tammy Riklin Raviv, Ph.D. received the BSc degree in physics, the MSc degree in computer science (both manga cum laude) from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the PhD degree from the School of Electrical Engineering of Tel-Aviv University. She is an associate professor at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Ben-Gurion University. During 2010-2012, she was a research fellow at Harvard Medical School and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. In 2008-2010, she was a post-doctorate associate with the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), MIT.

Wei Chen, Ph.D., is a distinguished professor at Fudan University in China, specializing in biomedical engineering. She is known for her groundbreaking research in regenerative medicine and tissue engineering. Wei has published extensively in top-tier journals and frequently speaks at international conferences. She will be the lead organizer for the Asia-Pacific Biomedical Engineering Conference in 2026.

Virginia Laura Ballarin is a Professor in the Signal Processing area at the Electronics Engineering Department of the Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata, Argentina. She directed the Image Processing Research Group at the Research Institute of Science and Technology in Electronics from 2011 to 2023. She has supervised over 20 PhD theses and 25 undergraduate theses in biomedical image processing, authored 80+ papers in refereed journals, and presented at 130+ conferences. Ballarin is the Director of the Postgraduate Program in Bioengineering at the Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata, an Associate Editor for the Smart Hospital Section of the Computational and Structural Biotechnology Journal, and was Chief Editor of the Argentinian Bioengineering Journal from 2015 to 2023. She served as President of the Argentinian Bioengineering Society (2013-2015), President of the Argentinian Chapter of EMBS-IEEE (2016-2018), and EMBS Representative for Regional 9 in 2021. She is Vice President of the IEEE Argentinian Chapter, Vice President of the Regional Council of Biomedical Engineering for Latin America (CORAL), and a member of the Administrative Council of the International Federation for Medical and Biological Engineering (IFMBE) from 2022 to 2028.

Rose T. Faghih received her B.S. in electrical engineering (summa cum laude) from the University of Maryland in 2008 and her S.M. and Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT in 2010 and 2014, respectively. She is an associate professor of Biomedical Engineering at New York University (NYU) and directs the Computational Medicine Laboratory at NYU Langone Health’s Tech4Health Institute. Previously, she was an assistant professor at the University of Houston and completed postdoctoral training at MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital. Her research focuses on wearable technologies, medical cyber-physical systems, and control and estimation of biomedical and neural systems. Dr. Faghih has received numerous awards, including the MIT Technology Review Innovator Under 35 (2020), the NSF CAREER Award (2020), and the IEEE-USA New Face of Engineering award (2016). She has also been honored with fellowships from NSF and MIT and has been inducted into honor societies such as Phi Kappa Phi, Tau Beta Pi, and Eta Kappa Nu.

Marianna Semprini received her B.S. in Biomedical Engineering (2004) and M.S. in Bioengineering (Neuroengineering curriculum, 2007) from the University of Genoa, Italy. In 2007, she was a research fellow at Northwestern University, and in 2011, she earned her Ph.D. in Robotics and Neurosciences from the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT). She was a visiting scientist at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in 2016. Her research focuses on brain-machine interfaces for restoring sensory or motor functions and non-invasive biofeedback for motor rehabilitation. Currently, she leads a group at IIT’s Rehab Technologies Lab, focusing on neurorehabilitation and neural control of movement. She is a member of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society and IEEE Women in Engineering.

Dr. Rosa H. M. Chan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electronic Engineering at the City University of Hong Kong. She received her Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from USC in 2011 and earned M.S. degrees in Biomedical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, and Aerospace Engineering. At USC’s Center for Neural Engineering, she developed neural prostheses for cognitive function restoration. She holds a B.Eng (1st Hon.) in Automation and Computer-Aided Engineering from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where she also researched carbon nanotube manipulation. Dr. Chan’s research focuses on biologically constrained mathematical models of mammalian neural systems. She has received several prestigious scholarships and fellowships, including the Croucher Scholarship, Sir Edward Youde Memorial Fellowship, and Google Scholarship.

Dr. Qiu is a global STEM scholar and professor at the Department of Health Technology and Informatics at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. She previously held leadership roles at the National University of Singapore (NUS), where she founded the Laboratory for Medical Image Data Sciences and served as Deputy Head for Research & Enterprises and Director for the BME Center at the NUS Suzhou Research Institute. Dr. Qiu specializes in computational analyses of health differences using complex datasets, including disease phenotypes, neuroimaging, and genetics. Her work has earned her numerous accolades, including the NUS Faculty Young Research Award and the 2016 Young Researcher Award. She has also been honored with the “Dean’s Chair” Associate Professorship. Additionally, Dr. Qiu has served as Treasurer for the Council of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping and as an editor for journals like Neuroimage and Frontiers in Neuroscience.

Metin Akay, Ph.D. is the founding chair of the Biomedical Engineering Department and the John S. Dunn professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Houston. He is the Chief Ambassador for IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society and has given numerous keynote talks on emerging biomedical technologies. His lab focuses on developing intelligent wearable systems for monitoring motor functions in post-stroke patients and detecting coronary artery disease.

Paul Sajda, Ph.D. is a Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, and Radiology at Columbia University, where he directs the Laboratory for Intelligent Imaging and Neural Computing and co-directs the Center for Neural Engineering and Computation. He is the President of IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society and has received numerous awards, including the NSF CAREER Award and the Sarnoff Technical Achievement Award.