Early Career Awards
The BCI Society Early Career Awards
— Closed
After the exciting inaugural edition of the BCI Society Early Career Award (ECA) in 2020, the winner of which focused specifically on the Translational aspects of BCI research, the BCI Society is pleased to announce a new round of ECAs in 2021. Acknowledging the multidisciplinary character of the BCI field, this year’s ECAs will focus on two other critical aspects of BCI research: Neuroscience and Methods. Nominees must have a history of scholarly work that has advanced the field. More specifically, the ECA Neuroscience recognizes an individual who has contributed significantly to scientific progress in understanding brain structure, brain function and/or brain signals related to BCIs. The ECA Methods, on the other hand, recognizes an individual who has contributed significantly to scientific progress in the development of algorithms, software and/or hardware related to BCIs.
2021 Early Career Award Recipients
Neuroscience Category

Camille Jeunet
Aquitaine Institute for Cognitive and Integrative Neuroscience, Univ. Bordeaux & CNRS, France
Camille Jeunet received her PhD in cognitive sciences in 2016 at the University of Bordeaux, France. After a post-doctoral fellowship in Inria (Rennes, France) and EPFL (Geneva, Switzerland), she was recruited as a tenured CNRS Research Scientist. She first joined the CLLE lab in Toulouse in 2018. In 2021, she has rejoined the institute for cognitive and integrative neurosciences (INCIA) in Bordeaux, where she leads an interdisciplinary research on the use of EEG-BCIs to improve or restore cognitive and motor abilities, both for clinical (stroke patients and patients with Parkinson disease) and non-clinical (athletes) populations. She is particularly interested in studying the learning mechanisms underlying neurofeedback training as well as the acceptability of neurofeedback procedures and BCI technologies. Camille Jeunet has received 3 PhD awards, the European Label as well as 3 national fundings from the French research agency for her research. Since 2017, she is a board member of the French BCI association, CORTICO.
Methods Category

Frank Willett
Neural Prosthetics Translational Laboratory, Stanford University, USA
Frank Willett is a Research Scientist working in the Neural Prosthetics Translational Laboratory at Stanford University. His work is aimed broadly at brain-computer interfaces and understanding how the brain represents and controls movement. Recently, Frank has developed a brain-computer interface that can decode attempted handwriting movements from neural activity in motor cortex. Frank has also worked on understanding how different body parts are represented in motor cortex at single neuron resolution. This work led to a surprising finding: what was previously thought to be “arm/hand” area of motor cortex actually contains an interlinked representation of the entire body. Prior to working at Stanford University, Frank earned his PhD in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Case Western Reserve University.
2020 Recipient
Sebastian Halder
Lecturer, University of Essex
Thank you to our jurors for the 2021 Early Career Awards:
Luigi Bianchi
Ricardo Chavarriaga
Febo Cincotti
Karunesh Ganguly
Robert Gaunt
Ning Jiang
Virginia de Sa
Aleksandra Vuckovic