EMBS is happy to announce the Newly Elected ExCom Members. Please join us in welcoming our newest ExCom members.
President-Elect: Metin Akay
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 received his B.S. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey in 1981 and 1984, respectively and a Ph.D. degree from Rutgers University in 1990.
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 is also the editor of the Neural Engineering Handbook published by Wiley/IEEE Press and the first steering committee chair of the IEEE Trans on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics. He established the International Summer School on BIO-X: Biocomplexity, Biodesign , Bioinnovation, Biomanufacturing and Bioentrepreneurship sponsored by the NSF and co-sponsored by the IEEE EMBS and was the founding chair of the IEEE EMBS Special Topic Conference on Neural Engineering.
He was also the first chair of the IEEE EMBS Neuroengineering Technical Committee. He served as the program chair of the IEEE EMBS 2001 and the co-chair of the IEEE EMBS 2006 and the program co-chair of the IEEE EMBS 2011 conference held in Boston. Dr. Akay is a recipient of the IEEE EMBS Early Career and Service awards as well an IEEE Third Millennium Medal and is a fellow of IEEE, the Institute of Physics (IOP), the American Institute of Medical Biological Engineering (AIMBE) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). His Neural Engineering and Informatics Lab is interested in nicotine and alcohol addiction and detecting coronary artery disease. In addition, his lab is Engineering High-Throughput 3D in vitro Platform for Targeting Glioblastoma Multiforme (GBM) Vasculature and molecular profiling.
Vice President-Elect Conferences: James Weiland
James Weiland received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan in 1988. After 4 years in industry with Pratt & Whitney Aircraft Engines, he returned to Michigan for graduate school, earning degrees in Biomedical Engineering (M.S. 1993, Ph.D. 1997) and Electrical Engineering (M.S. 1995). He joined the Wilmer Ophthalmological Institute at Johns Hopkins University in 1997 as a postdoctoral fellow and, in 1999, was appointed an assistant professor of ophthalmology at Johns Hopkins. Dr. Weiland was appointed assistant professor at the Doheny Eye Institute-University of Southern California in 2001, and was promoted to Professor of Ophthalmology and Biomedical Engineering in 2013.
In 2017, Dr. Weiland was appointed as Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Ophthalmology & Visual Sciences at the University of Michigan. Dr. Weiland has over 100 peer-reviewed articles and has been PI on research grants from NIH, NSF, and DoD. Dr. Weiland’s research interests include retinal prostheses, neural prostheses, electrode technology, visual evoked responses, implantable electrical systems, and wearable visual aids for the blind. He is a Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering and a Fellow of the IEEE.
Vice President-Elect Members and Students: Carolyn McGregor
Professor Carolyn McGregor AM is the Research Excellence Chair in Health Informatics, Professor and was Founding Associate Dean of Research in the Faculty of Business and IT at Ontario Tech University in Canada. She holds a fractional professorial position in the Faculty of Engineering and IT at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) in Australia also. She is a two time Canada Research Chair and will be the founding Director of a Joint Research Centre in AI for Health and Wellness between Ontario Tech and UTS from August. She has led pioneering research in Big Data analytics, AI, deep learning, IoT, temporal data mining and cloud computing. She progresses this research within the context of critical care medicine, mental health, astronaut health and military and first responder resilience training.
She has been awarded over $12 million in research funding, has over 170 refereed publications, 3 patent in multiple jurisdictions and has established two startup companies resulting from her research. She has extensive research collaborations in Canada, USA, Russia, Australia and India. She has received many awards for her research and in 2014 she was awarded membership in the Order of Australia for her significant service to science and innovation through health care information systems. In 2017 she was featured in the 150 Stories series commissioned by the Lieutenant Governor of Ontario and the Government of Canada to commemorate the 150th year anniversary of Ontario and Canada. In 2018 she was named as a Women Leader in Digital Health by Digital Health Canada.