Plenary Speakers

Melanie Fried-Oken, PhD is professor of Neurology, Pediatrics, Biomedical Engineering and Otolaryngology at the Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, Oregon USA. Melanie is an internationally recognized speech-language pathologist and clinical researcher in the area of Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) and assistive technology. She is a fellow of the International Society for Augmentative and Alternative Communication (ISAAC) and the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA). She is a Principal Investigator in CAMBI.tech (Consortium for Accessible Brain-Body Interfaces) and has led a federally-funded multidisciplinary wearable BCI team for the past 15 years. Melanie’s work is based on the tenet that communication is a basic human right. CAMBI’s research agenda is guided by clinical interactions with people who experience severe speech and physical impairments and cannot find tools or techniques to express themselves adequately. The end-users and their families are members of the research teams that design and evaluate new technologies, including wearable communication BCIs.

Dr Juan Gallego is a Senior Lecturer (roughly equivalent to Associate Professor) and Group Leader in the Department of Bioengineering at Imperial College London, which he joined in January 2020. Dr Gallego’s research focuses on understanding how animals learn and control their movements through a combination of behavioural experiments, large-scale neural recordings, data analysis, and computational models. He is also interested in applying his group’s findings to advance neural interfaces that restore function to people with movement disorders. During his career, he has published more than thirty journal articles on these various topics, and received funding by the EU Commission, the UK Research Institutes, and the European Research Council.

Karunesh Ganguly MD, PhD is a clinical neurologist and a research scientist at the University of California, San Francisco and the San Francisco VA Medical Center.  He completed his MD/PhD degrees through the Medical Scientist Training Program at the University of California, San Diego.  He subsequently completed his internal medicine and neurology residency at the University of California, San Francisco.   Concurrent with his residency, he conducted research into the development of ‘Brain-Machine Interfaces’ in the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science at UC Berkeley.  His clinical expertise is on the neurological rehabilitation of patients with motor impairments.  He is also the Director of the Neural Engineering & Plasticity Lab.  The laboratory’s basic and translational research program focuses on the development of technology to improve motor function. His laboratory’s work is funded by the NIH/NINDS/NICHD and the VHA. He has been awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE Award) and was selected for a New Innovator Award by the NIH Office of the Director. He was also recent awarded the Outstanding Neurorehabilitation Clinical Scientist Award by the American Society of Neurorehabilitation (ASNR).