Advisory Board and Steering Committee

Metin Akay is currently the founding chair of the new Biomedical Engineering Department and the John S. Dunn professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Houston. He is the founding editor-in-chief of the Biomedical Engineering Book Series published by the Wiley and IEEE Press and the Wiley Encyclopedia of Biomedical Engineering. He established the Annual International Summer School on Biocomplexity from Gene to System sponsored by the NSF and the IEEE EMBS and the IEEE EMBS Special Topic Conference on Neural Engineering. He is also the chair of the IEEE EMBS Neuroengineering Technical Committee. He was the program chair of the International IEEE EMBS 2001 and the co-chair of the International IEEE EMBS 2006.

Dr. Akay is a recipient of the IEEE EMBS Early Career and IEEE EMBS Service awards, the first Information Technology Applications in Biomedicine (ITAB) Leadership award as well an IEEE Third Millenium Medal and is a fellow of IEEE, IOP, AIMBE, and AAAS. His Neural Engineering and Informatics Lab is interested in developing an intelligent system for detecting coronary artery disease and investigating the effect of nicotine on the dynamics of ventral tegmental area dopamine neural networks.

Paolo Bonato, Ph.D., serves as Director of the Motion Analysis Laboratory at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital, Boston MA. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Harvard Medical School, Boston MA, an Adjunct Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the MGH Institute of Health Professions, Boston MA, an Associate Faculty Member at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, and an Adjunct Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northeastern University. He has held Adjunct Faculty positions at MIT, the University of Ireland Galway, and the University of Melbourne. His research work is focused on the development of rehabilitation technologies with special emphasis on wearable technology and robotics. Dr. Bonato served as the Founding Editor-in-Chief of Journal on NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation. He serves as a Member of the Advisory Board of the IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics and as Associate Editor of the IEEE Journal of Translational Engineering in Health and Medicine. Dr. Bonato served as an Elected Member of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS) AdCom (2007-2010) and as President of the International Society of Electrophysiology and Kinesiology (2008-2010). Dr. Bonato served as Chair of the IEEE EMBS Technical Committee on Wearable Biomedical Sensors and Systems in 2008 and as founding member of this committee (2004-2012). He also served as Chair of the 33rd Annual International Conference of the IEEE EMBS (2011) and as Co-Chair of the 37th Annual International Conference of the IEEE EMBS (2015). He recently served as IEEE EMBS Vice President for Publications (2013-2016). He received the M.S. degree in electrical engineering from Politecnico di Torino, Turin, Italy in 1989 and the Ph.D. degree in biomedical engineering from Universita` di Roma “La Sapienza” in 1995. Dr. Bonato’s work has received more than 6,500 citations (Google Scholar).

Professor, School of Electrical and Computer Eng. and Wallace H. Coulter Dept. of Biomedical Eng., Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332-0250

Professional Preparation

• Rice University Electrical and Computer Engineering, PhD 1996
• Rice University Electrical and Computer Engineering, MSEE 1994
• Georgia Institute of Technology Electrical Engineering BEE 1991

Appointments

• Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA.
  Academic Positions: Professor (with tenure, 2010- present), Associate Professor (with tenure, 2004-2010) and Assistant Professor (1999-2004), School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
  Administrative Positions: Interim Associate Dean for Research and Innovation, College of Engineering (2016-present), Co-Director, Center for Neural Engineering (2014-2016), Executive Committee, Emory Neuromodulation Technology Innovation Center (2013-present), Faculty Director of Grand Challenges Living Learning Community (2012-2015). Faculty Director of Graduate Studies (2009-11). Director, Interdisciplinary Bioengineering Graduate Program (2005-8). Associate Director (2004-9) and Director (2010-12), NSF IGERT Program in Hybrid Neural Microsystems.
• US Dept of State, Washington, DC. Jefferson Science Fellow and Senior Bioengineer (2008-2009), serving as a science advisor to the State Dept. on foreign policy issues in the areas of biosecurity, biosafety, and biological weapons nonproliferation.
• National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD. Postdoctoral Fellow (1998-1999), Laboratory for Neural Control, NINDS, Postdoctoral Fellow (1996-1998), Mathematical Research Branch, NIDDK
  Control, NINDS, Postdoctoral Fellow (1996-1998), Mathematical Research Branch, NIDDK

Andrew F. Laine received his D.Sc. degree from Washington University (St. Louis) School of Engineering and Applied Science in Computer Science, in 1989 and BS degree from Cornell University (Ithaca, NY). He was a Professor in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences and Engineering at the University of Florida (Gainesville, FL) from 1990-1997. He joined the Department of Biomedical Engineering in 1997 and served as Vice Chair of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Columbia University since 2003 – 2011. He is currently Chair of the Department of Biomedical Engineering and Director of the Heffner Biomedical Imaging at Columbia University and the Percy K. and Vida L. W. Hudson Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Professor of Radiology (Physics).

He was the Program Chair for the IEEE EMBS annual conference in 2006 held in New York City and Program Chair for the EMBS annual conference for 2011 held in Boston, MA. He was the founding chair of the SPIE conference on “Mathematical Imaging: Wavelet Application in Signal and Image Processing”, and served as co-chair during the years 1993-2003. Professor Laine served on the IEEE ISBI (International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging) steering committee, 2006-2009 and presently serves as Chair. Finally, he has served as the IEEE EMBS Vice President of Publications, 2008-2012. He is a Fellow of IEEE and AIMBE. His research interests include quantitative analysis of medical and biological images, including cardiac ultrasound, MRI/Spectroscopy and SPECT/PET, health analytics and data mining of longitudinal medical records, and image informatics.

Nigel Lovell received the B.E. (Hons) and Ph.D. degrees from the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney, Australia. He is currently at the Graduate School of Biomedical Engineering UNSW where he holds a position of Scientia Professor. He has authored 230+ journal papers and been awarded over $80 million in R&D and infrastructure funding. His research work has covered areas of expertise ranging from cardiac modeling, telehealth technologies, biological signal processing, and visual prosthesis design. Through a spin-out company from UNSW, TeleMedCare Pty. Ltd., he has commercialised a range of telehealth technologies for managing chronic disease and falls in the older population. He is also one of the key researchers leading an R&D program to develop in Australia a retinal neuroprosthesis or ‘bionic eye’. For 2017 and 2018 he will be the President of the world’s largest biomedical engineering society – the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society.

Adjunct Professor of Bioengineering, University of California San Diego; Emeritus Professor of Bioengineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Emeritus Professor of Biomedical Engineering, University of Florida

Bruce Wheeler moved to the University of California at San Diego in 2015 as an Adjunct Professor of Bioengineering with duties principally aimed at supporting the new Systems Bioengineering major at UCSD.  He served 7 years at the University of Florida and 28 years at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. At Illinois he wrote the successful proposal for the BS, MS, PHD and Department of Bioengineering and served as Director and then Founding and Interim Head from Jan 2003 to Jan 2008.  He was also a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and of the Beckman Institute; he served as Chair of the Neuroscience Program and as Associate Head for Undergraduate Affairs of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department.  For four years at Florida he served as Acting Chair of the J. Crayton Pruitt Family Department of Biomedical Engineering where he co-authored the proposal for the BS BME degree.

In Jan 2013 he began a two year term as President of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, the world’s largest, oldest, and most global bioengineering society. He strongly advocated for Biomedical and Health Informatics as the fastest growing component of biomedical engineering. From Jan 2007 to Dec 2012 he was Editor in Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, the oldest, likely the largest and certainly one of the most influential general biomedical engineering journals.

Prof. Wheeler’s research interests lie in the application of electrical engineering methodologies to neuroscience. His work influenced the development of neural spike sorting technologies, demonstrated that microelectrode array recording from brain slices was possible and productive, and has been a leader in the development of lithography to control cells, especially neurons, in culture. This work aims at basic science understanding of the behavior of small populations of neurons, in hopes of creating better insight into the functioning of the brain.  He has had funding from various agencies, including NIH, NSF, Whitaker, the USDA, and the American Epilepsy Foundation. Current funding is an NIH R01 grant.

He is a Fellow of AAAS, IEEE, BMES, AIME, and IAMBE. He is likely the only person to start two undergraduate BME degree programs. He is Emeritus Professor at Illinois and Florida.

Professor Guang-Zhong Yang (CBE, FREng, FIEEE) was the Editor-in-Chief for JBHI between 2013-2016. Currently, he is a chair professor and the founding dean of the Institute of Medical Robotics at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He was the founder and director of the Hamlyn Centre for Robotic Surgery, Imperial College London, UK. Professor Yang’s main research interests are in medical imaging, sensing and robotics. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, fellow of IEEE, IET, AIMBE, IAMBE, MICCAI, CGI and a recipient of the Royal Society Research Merit Award and listed in The Times Eureka ‘Top 100’ in British Science. Professor Yang is the founding editor of Science Robotics (http://robotics.sciencemag.org/) – a journal of the Science family dedicated to the latest advances in robotics and how it enables or underpins new scientific discoveries. He was awarded a CBE in the Queen’s 2017 New Year Honour for his contribution to biomedical engineering.

Dr. Yuan-Ting Zhang is currently Director of Joint Research Center for Biomedical Engineering and Professor of Department of Electronic Engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). Dr. Zhang serves concurrently the Director of the Key Lab for Health Informatics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (HICAS).

Dr. Zhang has devoted much of his professional career to education and research in the interdisciplinary area that combines engineering and biomedicine. His research spans several fields, including wearable medical devices, body sensor networks, bio-THz technologies, bio-modeling, neural engineering, and cardiovascular health informatics, and is closely tied up to his teaching and publishing activities. He has authored/co-authored over 400 scientific publications, and filed 31 patents, some of which are being licensed to companies for commercialization.

Dr. Zhang served previously the Vice-President of the IEEE-EMBS in 2000-2001, served as the Technical Program Chair and the General Conference Chair of the 20th and 27th IEEE-EMBS Annual International Conferences in 1998 and 2005, respectively. He served as Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, founding Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, and Guest Editor for IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine and IEEE Communication Magazine, and was selected as the recipient of the IEEE-EMBS outstanding service award in 2006. Dr. Zhang is Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine. He is a Fellow of IEEE, AIMBE and IAMBE.

Amir A. Amini is Professor and Endowed Chair in Bioimaging at the University of Louisville where he performs research in the area of biomedical imaging and image analysis. He received the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, with high honors when at 18 he was the youngest graduate of the University, and the M.S. and PhD degrees from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, in 1984 and 1990 respectively. After postdoctoral work in biomedical imaging (1990-1992), he was at Yale as Assistant Professor (1992-1996). He then moved to Washington University in St. Louis where he was Assistant and then Associate Professor with tenure (1996-2006). He has been at the University of Louisville since August 2006. He is the recipient of the National Institutes of Health FIRST Award in 1998 and University of Louisville Delphi Center for Teaching and Learning for his course on medical imaging. He received the Distinguished Lecturer Award from the IEEE EMBS in 2013, has served since 2013 on the IEEE EMBS Technical Committee on Biomedical Imaging and Image Processing (BIIP), and served on the EMBS Administrative Committee (Ad Com) for the term 2016-2018. He has served on numerous NSF and NIH study sections and has mentored 45 M.S., Ph.D, and postdoctoral advisees throughout his career. He has ~190 publications including a number of books and proceedings, and has five provisional or issued US patents. Dr. Amini Co-Chaired the IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging in Washington, DC in April 2018 and was elected Vice President for Publications for the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society for the term 2020-2021. He is a Fellow of American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), International Society for Optics, Photonics, and Imaging (SPIE) and of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE; M’82–SM’97–F’07).

Journal Editorial Experience

• Associate Editor, IEEE Journal for Biomedical and Health Informatics, since 2016
• Associate Editor, IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, since 2014
• Associate Editor, Computerized Medical Imaging and Graphics, since 2012
• Associate Editor, IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, since 1999
• Associate Editor, IEEE Open Journal for Engineering in Medicine and Biology since 2020
• Guest Editor (with F. Bookstein and D. Wilson), Computer Vision, Graphics, and Image Processing Special Issue on Biomedical Image Analysis, May 1997
• Guest Editor (with A. Frangi and E. Bullitt), IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging Special Issue on Vascular Imaging, April 2005
• Acting Associate Editor, Medical Physics, 2005

Conference Organization Experience

• General Co-Chair (with S. Acton), IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging, Washington, DC, April 2018
• General Co-Chair (with A. Manduca), SPIE Medical Imaging Conference on Physiology, Function, and Structure from Medical Images, 2003-2006
• General Co-Chair (with M. Sonka and E. Krupinski), SPIE Medical Imaging Symposium, San Diego, CA, February 2007
• Theme Co-Chair for Biomedical Imaging, IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Conference, 2012
• Co-Editor (with J. Ji) of Theme 2 (Biomedical Imaging), IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Conference Editorial Board, 2015-2018
• Member of scientific program committee, conference editorial board, area chair, or paper selection committee for 63 conferences and workshops in the area of medical imaging and medical image analysis, 1995-2018

Five Representative Publications

• M. Mehdi Farhangi, Nicholas Petrick, Berkman Sahiner, Hichem Frigui, Amir Amini, Aria Pezeshk, “Recurrent Attention Network for False Positive Reduction in the Detection of Pulmonary Nodules in Thoracic CT Scans” Medical Physics, in press, DOI: 10.1002/mp.14076 February 2020.
• B. Veasey, M. Farhangi, H. Frigui, J. Broadhead, M. Dahle. A. Pezeshk, A. Seow. A. Amini, “Lung Nodule Malignancy Classification Based on NLSTx Data”, IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging, Iowa City, IA, April 2020
• M. Farhangi, H. Frigui, A. Seow, and A. Amini, “3D Active Contour Segmentation Based on Sparse Linear Combination of Training Shapes (SCoTS)”, IEEE Trans. on Medical Imaging, Vol. 36, Issue 11, pp. 2239-2249, Nov. 2017.
• I. El-Sayed, A. Hussanein, H. Wang, and A. Amini, “Tagging Analysis Techniques: I”, Chapter 15 of Heart Mechanics: Magnetic Resonance Imaging – Advanced Techniques, Clinical Applications and Future Trends, I. El-Sayed (Ed.), CRC Press, 2017.
• M. J. Negahdar, M. Kadbi, M. Kendrick, M. Stoddard, A. Amini. “4D spiral imaging of flows in stenotic phantoms and subjects with aortic stenosis.” Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, 75(3):1018–1029, March 2016.

Professor Wong has over three decades of research and executive experience in industry and academia. He helped develop one of the first optical time domain reflectometers in Australia, worked on massive deductive databases and bioinformatics in the Japanese Fifth Generation Computer Project (ICOT), contributed to the development and production of world’s first VLSI MB DRAM chips at Bell Labs and the first hospital-integrated digital radiology system (Picture Archiving and Communication System-PACS) in the US Academic Medical Centers while at UCSF.  He directed integrative product development efforts for Philips Healthcare, developed and produced an electronic web trading platform at Charles Schwab, founded the Functional and Molecular Imaging Center at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, including the creation of cyclotron and PET/MRI/optical research imaging facilities, and the HCNR Center for Bioinformatics at Harvard Medical School.  The mission of his laboratory at Houston Methodist is to elucidate biological mechanisms and translate the findings into prevention, detection, diagnosis, and treatment of cancer and neurological disorders.

Dr. Yuan-Ting Zhang is currently Director of Joint Research Center for Biomedical Engineering and Professor of Department of Electronic Engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). Dr. Zhang serves concurrently the Director of the Key Lab for Health Informatics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (HICAS).

Dr. Zhang has devoted much of his professional career to education and research in the interdisciplinary area that combines engineering and biomedicine. His research spans several fields, including wearable medical devices, body sensor networks, bio-THz technologies, bio-modeling, neural engineering, and cardiovascular health informatics, and is closely tied up to his teaching and publishing activities. He has authored/co-authored over 400 scientific publications, and filed 31 patents, some of which are being licensed to companies for commercialization.

Dr. Zhang served previously the Vice-President of the IEEE-EMBS in 2000-2001, served as the Technical Program Chair and the General Conference Chair of the 20th and 27th IEEE-EMBS Annual International Conferences in 1998 and 2005, respectively. He served as Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, founding Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, and Guest Editor for IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine and IEEE Communication Magazine, and was selected as the recipient of the IEEE-EMBS outstanding service award in 2006. Dr. Zhang is Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine. He is a Fellow of IEEE, AIMBE and IAMBE.

Joel J. P. C. Rodrigues [Fellow, IEEE & AAIA] is with Senac Faculty of Ceará, Brazil, head of research, development, and innovation; and senior researcher at the Instituto de Telecomunicações, Portugal. Prof. Rodrigues is an Highly Cited Researcher, the leader of the Next Generation Networks and Applications (NetGNA) research group (CNPq), an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer, Member Representative of the IEEE Communications Society on the IEEE Biometrics Council, and the President of the scientific council at ParkUrbis – Covilhã Science and Technology Park. He was Director for Conference Development – IEEE ComSoc Board of Governors, Technical Activities Committee Chair of the IEEE ComSoc Latin America Region Board, a Past-Chair of the IEEE ComSoc Technical Committee (TC) on eHealth and the TC on Communications Software, a Steering Committee member of the IEEE Life Sciences Technical Community and Publications co-Chair. He is the editor-in-chief of the International Journal of E-Health and Medical Communications and editorial board member of several high-reputed journals (mainly, from IEEE). He has been general chair and TPC Chair of many international conferences, including IEEE ICC, IEEE GLOBECOM, IEEE HEALTHCOM, and IEEE LatinCom. He has authored or coauthored about 1000 papers in refereed international journals and conferences, 3 books, 2 patents, and 1 ITU-T Recommendation. He had been awarded several Outstanding Leadership and Outstanding Service Awards by IEEE Communications Society and several best papers awards. Prof. Rodrigues is a member of the Internet Society, a senior member ACM, and Fellow of AAIA and IEEE.