Prof. Metin Akay 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 has played a key role in promoting the biomedical education in the world by writing several prestigious books and editing the Biomedical Engineering Book Series published by the Wiley and IEEE Press Prof Akay is author/coauthor/editor of 14 books and giving more 50 keynote, plenary and invited talks at the international meetings including the first, second and third Latin-American Conference on Biomedical Engineering'98, 01, 04.

He is the founding chair of the Annual International Summer School on Biocomplexity from System, to Gene sponsored by the NSF and Dartmouth College and technically co-sponsored by the IEEE EMBS, of the Satellite Conference on Emerging Technologies in Biomedical Engineering. He is also the founding chair of the International IEEE Conference on Neural Engineering, in 2003. These activities were sponsored by the NSF and largely attended by the women and minorities.

Dr. Yasemin M. Akay is currently an Intructional and Research Assistant Professor at the Department of Biomedical Engineering, Cullen College of Engineering, University of Houston. She received her B.S. in Pharmaceutical Sciences from the Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey in 1980 and M.S. and Ph.D in Biomedical Engineering from the Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ, USA in 1991 and 1998, respectively.

She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Physiology and Pharmacology Departments, Dartmouth Medical School and at the Department of Physiology and Biophysics, Boston University, School of Medicine. She was also an assistant editor for the IEEE (Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers) Book Series from September 2001 to May 2004 and managing editor for the Wiley Encyclopedia of Biomedical Engineering from May 2004 till present. Her current research interests include Molecular Neuroengineering, Neural Growth and Neurodegeneration.

Michalis Zervakis holds a Ph.D degree from the University of Toronto, Department of Electrical Engineering, since 1990. He joined the Technical University of Crete on January 1995, where he is currently full professor at the department of Electronic and Computer Engineering. Prof. Zervakis is the director of the Digital Image and Signal Processing Laboratory (DISPLAY) and is involved in research on modern aspects of signal processing, including estimation and constrained optimization, multi-channel and multi-band signal processing, wavelet analysis for data/ image processing and compression, biomedical imaging applications, neural networks and fuzzy logic in automation applications. He has been involved in more than 20 international projects and has published more than 90 papers in related areas of image/signal processing.

Ming Jack Po is a product manager at Google working on healthcare. Previously, he led BioDesign at Columbia University, where he also did his MD / PhD. He focuses on productivity, healthcare, math, and gadgets.- Jack started his entrepreneurial journey in the late 1990's as a high school student at Stuyvesant High School. He co-founded and led the technology team at a venture backed startup before being recruited to Wall Street by quantitative hedge fund D. E. Shaw & Co. Since that time, Jack has expanded his entrepreneurial activities outside of internet technology into medical devices. Jack is a 2011 Global Shapers at the World Economics Forum, a 2011 InSITE fellow, a 2011 Fellow in the Startup Leadership Program in New York, and currently serves on the board of several companies and non-profit organizations.
 

Dr. Andrei Dragomir received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the Politehnica University, Bucharest, Romania in 1999 and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Patras, Greece in 2002 and 2006, respectively.

Andrei joined the Harrington Department of Bioengineering at Arizona State University as a postdoctoral researcher in December 2006 and is now an Instructional and Research Assistant Professor at the Department of Biomedical Engineering, Cullen College of Engineering, University of Houston.

Ms. My-Dung Lieu is currently Department Business Administrator at the Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Houston.

Dr. Ting Chen received his BS and PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Arizona State Univesity. In 2010, he joined the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Houston as an Instructional Assistant Professor. He received his MBA from Indiana University in 2017. He is now the Assistant Chair for the Biomedical Engineering Department at the University of Houston.

Dr. Yoshinori Sunaga received M.E. degree and Ph.D. degree in Graduate School of Materials Science from Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan, in March 2014 and March 2017. He is interested in development of novel devices for observing and accessing brain activity of animals to reveal new brain mechanism. Currently, he is a postdoctoral fellow and starts collaboration research between Nara Institute of Science and Technology and the University of Houston. His research focus is on the understanding of the behavior of dopaminergic neurons in the ventral tegmental area using an in vivo rat model and an imaging device. He also enjoys spending time playing sports, especially soccer and volleyball.