Congratulations to the Newly Elected ExCom Members

Congratulations to the Newly Elected ExCom Members 150 150 IEEE EMBS

Shankar Subramaniam
University of California San Diego

President Elect (2018)

Shankar SubramaniamShankar Subramaniam is the Joan and Irwin Jacobs Endowed Chair Professor of Bioengineering and Systems Biology at the University of California San Diego. He is a distinguished professor of Bioengineering, Computer Science & Engineering, Cellular & Molecular Medicine and Nano Engineering at the University of California San Diego. He is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering and a Senior Member of IEEE. Subramaniam’s innovative work has major impact on research and development in academia and industry by allowing the synthesis of complex biological and medical information from genes and molecules into integrated knowledge at cellular and system levels, thus providing important basis for drug discovery and innovation. He was a pioneer in bioinformatics with his development of the Biology Workbench, the first of its kind in web-based infrastructures.
He has fostered training and research in systems biology and bioinformatics at the national level, serving on the NIH Director’s Advisory Committee on Bioinformatics and played a key role in the formulation of the NIH Director’s Roadmap which places a major emphasis on the use of quantitative approaches of engineering to biomedical research in health and disease. He has been instrumental in raising national awareness of the roles of these engineering approaches to biomedical research. He founded the UCSD Bioinformatics program and was Chair of the nationally top-ranked bioengineering program from 2008-2013. Dr. Subramaniam has collaborated with colleagues in clinical medicine to elucidate the molecular and genomic basis of the pathogenesis of diabetes, inflammation, atherosclerosis and myopathies by using modern approaches of systems biology and bioinformatics to analyze physiological and pathophysiological data, leading to the development of novel therapeutic measures and drug discovery.


Steve Wright
Texas A&M University

Vice President Member & Student Activities (2018-2021)

Steve WrightSteve received his Ph.D. in 1984 in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois. Dr. Wright began his career as an Engineer/Scientist for MRI at the Saint Francis Medical Center in Peoria, IL. He joined the faculty at Texas A&M University in 1988, where he established the Magnetic Resonance Systems Lab and is the Wisenbaker Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Biomedical Engineering and Radiology. From 2013 to 2017 he served as the associate department head for undergraduate education in ECE. During the summer and fall of 2000, he was a Visiting Professor at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, and currently has an affiliate appointment at the Advanced Imaging Research Center at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.
His research group was among the first to demonstrate parallel MRI and they have continued to develop new instrumentation including the first 16 and 64 channel MRI coils and receiver systems and recently the first 64 channel transmit array system. Dr. Wright has been an IEEE member since the late 1970’s, and the IEEE and EMBS has played an important role in his career. In 1997, he served as chair of the Student Activities Committee for the EMBS and was general chair of the IEEE flagship conference on biomedical imaging (ISBI: International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging) in 2011. He was a founding member of the EMBS Technical Committee on Medical Imaging and Image Processing, and has been an associate editor and member of the editorial board for TBME. He is currently VP for Member and Students in the EMBS. Dr. Wright is a Fellow of the IEEE, the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and the ISMRM, where he has served as a member of the board of trustees.


Jim Patton
University of Illinois at Chicago

Vice President Conferences (2018-2021)

James PattonJames L. Patton is Professor of Bioengineering at The University of Illinois at Chicago, and is a senior research scientist at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (RIC). He also holds an affiliate positions in Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Mechanical and Biomedical Engineering at Northwestern University. He was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan in but grew up in Racine, Wisconsin. He was educated in Mechanical Engineering and Engineering Science (dual BS, University of Michigan) Theoretical Mechanics (MS, Michigan State University), and Biomedical Engineering (Ph.D., Northwestern University). He worked for Ford Motor Company and as a cyclotron operator before turning his attention to academia and human movement. His general interests involve robotic teaching, balance gait, arm control, haptics, modeling, human-machine interfaces, and neurorehabilitation following brain injury.
He is Editor in Chief of the IEEE- Engineering in Medicine and Biology (EMB) Conference Editorial Board (CEB), associate Editor of Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, a member of the Advisory Committee for the EMB society, and chaired the technical committee on biomedical robotics. He is also the Director of the NIDILRR national Center for Rehabilitation Robotics (MARS-RERC.org), which has fostered more than 16 major research projects and numerous initiatives that further the cause of using technology for restoring function. He was the chair of the IEEE-EMBS Technical Committee on Biomedical Robotics and was Program Co-Chair of EMBC 2010 in Buenos Aires, served on the IEEE-EMBs Advisory Committee for two full terms, was Local Arrangements Chair for EMBc2014 in Chicago, and has been chair for Theme 8 for several of the IEEE-EMBC conferences.


Thanks to all the candidates that participated in the 2018 ExCom and AdCom Elections!