Riener studied mechanical engineering at TU Munich and University of Maryland, 1988-1993. He received a Dr.-Ing. degree from TU Munich in 1997. After postdoctoral work at TU Munich and Politechnic Milan, he completed his habilitation at TUM in 2003. In the same year he obtained an assistant professorship at ETH Zurich and University of Zurich, where he was promoted full professor in 2010 and 2016, respectively. Riener develops therapy and assistive devices for people with sensorimotor impairments. Riener has published more than 500 peer-reviewed articles, more than 30 book chapters and books, and he filed 26 patents. He is the inventor and initiator of the Cybathlon, president of ICORR, AAAS Leshner Fellow, Thomas Mann Fellow and he obtained more than 30 personal distinctions, including an honorary doctor degree from University of Basel.

Dr. Milica Radisic is a Professor at the University of Toronto, Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Organ-on-a-Chip Engineering and a Senior Scientist at the Toronto General Research Institute. She is a co-founder of the Center for Research and Applications in Fluidic Technologies (CRAFT) and a scientific lead of the Human Organ Emulation Self-driving Laboratory of the Acceleration Consortium. She is a Fellow of 10 academies and professional societies including the Royal Society of Canada-Academy of Science, Canadian Academy of Engineering, Canadian Academy of Health Sciences, the American Academy for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the American Institute for Medical & Biological Engineering (AIBME) etc. She was a recipient of the MIT Technology Review Top 35 Under 35, Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal, NSERC E.W.R Steacie Fellowship, YWCA Woman of Distinction Award, Killam Fellowship, Acta Biomaterialia Silver Medal, Humboldt Research Award and NSERC Polanyi Prize to name a few. Her research focuses on organ-on-a-chip engineering and development of new biomaterials that promote healing and attenuate scarring. She is internationally acclaimed for spearheading the field of organ-on-a-chip (OoC) engineering. To overcome the limitations of non-expandable human cardiomyocytes and species differences in animal models, her lab leveraged induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) to build functional human heart tissue and mature it using long-term electrical stimulation, enabling modeling of patient-specific cardiac disease. She developed new methods to vascularize tissues. She is an Executive Editor for ACS Biomaterials Science & Engineering, Senior Consulting Editor for the Journal of Molecular and Cellular Cardiology, a reviewing editor for eLife and a member of the editorial board of another 8 journals. She served on the Board of Directors for Ontario Society of Professional Engineers, Canadian Biomaterials Society and McMaster University Alumni Association. She organized Keystone, EMBO and ECI conferences and numerous sessions at TERMIS and BMES meetings. She served as a Chair and a Scientific Officer for the BME panel of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and member of review panels for CIHR and NIH. She is a co-founder of two companies TARA Biosystems (acquired by Valo Health), that uses human engineered heart tissues for screening of AI designed drugs, and Quthero that advances regenerative peptide based materials. Her work has been presented in over 260 publications, garnering over 26,000 citations with an h-index of 81. Her publications appeared in Cell, Nature Materials, Nature Methods, Nature Protocols, Nature Communications, PNAS etc.

Jim Collins is the Termeer Professor of Medical Engineering & Science and Professor of Biological Engineering at MIT, as well as a Member of the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences & Technology Faculty. He is also a Core Founding Faculty member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, and an Institute Member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Collins is one of the founders of the field of synthetic biology, and his research group is currently focused on using synthetic biology to create next-generation diagnostics and therapeutics as well as programmable molecular tools for the life sciences. Collins is also the Director of the Antibiotics-AI Project at MIT and co-founder of Phare Bio, a non-profit focused on AI-driven antibiotic discovery. Collins has received numerous awards and honors, including a MacArthur “Genius” Award and the Dickson Prize in Medicine, and he is an elected member of all three national academies – the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the National Academy of Medicine.

Maryam M. Shanechi is the Alexander A. Sawchuk Endowed Chair and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, Computer Science, and Neuroscience at USC, where she is also the Founding Director of the Center for Neurotechnology. She received her B.A.Sc. in Engineering Science from the University of Toronto and her S.M. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT. Her honors include the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, NSF CAREER Award, ONR Young Investigator Award, ASEE Curtis W. McGraw Research Award, MIT Technology Review Innovators Under 35 (TR35), Popular Science Brilliant 10, Science News SN10, One Mind Rising Star Award, and a DoD MURI. She is a Fellow of IEEE and AIMBE and a two-time Blavatnik National Awards Finalist.

Dr. Shanechi’s research integrates engineering, AI, and neuroscience to develop next-generation neurotechnologies and advance the understanding of brain function. She has introduced AI algorithms for multimodal modeling of brain-behavior data and developed AI-driven brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) that decode movement from brain activity to restore lost motor function in paralysis. She is also pioneering a new generation of BCIs that decode mental states such as mood to enable closed-loop neuromodulation for treating neuropsychiatric disorders such as depression.

Natalia K. Nikolova (IEEE S’93–M’97–SM’05–F’11) received the Dipl. Eng. (Radioelectronics) degree from the Technical University of Varna, Bulgaria, in 1989, and the Ph.D. degree from the University of Electro-Communications, Tokyo, Japan, in 1997. From 1998 to 1999, she held a Postdoctoral Fellowship of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC). In 1999, she joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at McMaster University, where she is currently a Professor and an Associate Chair Research. From 2008 to 2018, she held a Canada Research Chair in High-frequency Electromagnetics at McMaster University. Her research interests include inverse scattering, microwave and millimeter-wave imaging, synthetic aperture radar, antenna systems, as well as high-frequency analysis and design. Prof. Nikolova is an author of two books on microwave and millimeter-wave imaging and has co-authored more than 315 refereed research articles. She has delivered 58 invited talks, lectures and short courses worldwide. Prof. Nikolova is a Fellow of the IEEE, the Canadian Academy of Engineering, and the Engineering Institute of Canada.

Dr. Siddhartha Sikdar is a Distinguished University Professor of Bioengineering at George Mason University and the director of the Center for Advancing Systems Science and Bioengineering Innovation. He leads an interdisciplinary research group that conducts translational and applied research using novel biomedical imaging and sensing technologies. In particular, he is studying the interactions between the central and peripheral nervous system and the musculoskeletal system in a number of clinical conditions of major public health significance, such as chronic pain, stroke, spinal cord injury, and amputation. The research has potential applications in noninvasive diagnosis, screening, and treatment monitoring, understanding underlying mechanisms of disease, and for developing assistive technologies to improve function and quality of life in individuals with disability. Dr. Sikdar obtained his PhD in Electrical Engineering from University of Washington, Seattle in 2005. He received a postdoctoral fellowship from the American Heart Association. Dr. Sikdar has been a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, the Volgenau School of Engineering Rising Star Award, Mason’s Emerging Researcher/Scholar/Creator Award and was nominated for the Rising Star Faculty Award and the Outstanding Faculty Award of the State Council of Higher Education in Virginia. Dr. Sikdar’s research is funded by the NIH, NSF, and DoD.

Omer T. Inan is Regents Entrepreneur, Associate Chair for Entrepreneurship and Strategic Initiatives, and Linda J. and Mark C. Smith Chaired Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Adjunct Professor in the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 2004, 2005, and 2009, respectively. His research focuses on non-invasive physiological sensing and modulation for human health and performance. He has published 210 journal papers and 207 conference papers / abstracts, and has 21 issued patents. Dr. Inan received the IEEE Sensors Council Young Professional Award, the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, and the NSF CAREER Award in 2018. In 2021, he received an Academy Award for Technical Achievement from The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (Oscars), and the Georgia Tech Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Advisor Award. From 2023-2024, he was a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS). He is a Fellow of the IEEE, the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), the American College of Cardiology. Dr. Inan is also co-founder of multiple start-ups, including Cardiosense.

Vladan Koncar is a Full Professor at ENSAIT (National Graduate School of Arts and Textile Industries) in Roubaix, France, at the University of Lille. He obtained his PhD in 1991 from the University of Lille 1 in Villeneuve d’Ascq. From November 2009 to November 2015, he served as Research Director at ENSAIT and Director of the GEMTEX research laboratory. Professor Koncar was President of AUTEX (Association of Universities for Textiles, www.autex.org) from June 2007 to June 2010. He received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Iași, Romania, in January 2010.

Professor Koncar began working on smart and e-textiles more than twenty years ago and was one of the pioneers in this field.
He has chaired eleven international scientific conferences and serves on the editorial boards of numerous scientific journals. Professor Koncar is the author of more than 300 scientific publications (ISI Web of Science references, book chapters, books, conference proceedings, and patents). His research interests include flexible textile sensors and actuators, smart clothing and e-textiles, as well as the modeling and control of complex systems. He teaches in the areas of automation, computer networks, virtual reality, and smart textiles.
He has coordinated several national French research projects and has been the scientific coordinator of several European projects.

Paul Yager, Ph.D., is a professor in the Department of Bioengineering at the University of Washington, with adjunct appointments in Chemistry, Global Health, and Oral Biology. He received his A.B. in Biochemistry from Princeton in 1975, and a Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Oregon in 1980, specializing in vibrational spectroscopy of biomolecules. After an NRC Fellowship at the Naval Research Laboratory (1980-1982), he joined the NRL staff as a Research Chemist. He moved to UW as Associate Professor of Bioengineering in 1987, advancing to Professor in 1995; he served as Chair from 2007 to 2013. Initially working on self-organizing lipid microstructure and optically-based biomedical sensors, he became involved with the early development of microfluidics, and since 1992 his lab has focused primarily on development of conventional and paper microfluidics for the analysis of biological fluids for use in low-cost point-of-care biomedical diagnostics for the developed and developing worlds. As of 2025, he has authored 161 research publications in refereed journals, has 48 issued patents, a Google Scholar h-index of 83, 44 issued patents, over 30,000 citations to his work, and has co-founded 2 companies: Micronics and UbiDX.

Lorenzo Masia began his career in mechanical engineering with a degree from Sapienza University of Rome in 2003, followed by a PhD from the University of Padua in 2007. His initial steps into robotics were marked by two-year as researcher at MIT’s Newman Lab for Biomechanics and Human Rehabilitation, spanning from January 2005 to December 2006.
He took on the role of Team Leader at the Italian Institute of Technology, specifically in the Robotics Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department. By 2013, Masia he was an Assistant Professor at Nanyang Technological University of Singapore in the School of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering, where he remained until 2018 and later progressed at the University of Twente, where he held the position of Associate Professor in Biodesign. Professor Masia has been at Heidelberg University in Germany (2019-2024), serving as a Full Professor in Biorobotics & Medical Technology, where he founded the ARIES Lab, focusing on Assistive Robotics and Interactive ExoSuits at the Institute of Computer Engineering (ZITI).
From the 1st of October 2024, he is Professor in “Intelligent BioRobotic Systems” and Executive Director of the Munich Institute for Robotics and Machine Intelligence (MIRMI) at the Technical University of Munich (TUM).

Professor Masia’s work has garnered international acclaim, evidenced by multiple awards at leading conferences in Biorobotics and Robotic Rehabilitation, including two IEEE Best Paper Awards and three IEEE Best Student Paper Awards, among others. In addition to his research and teaching, Professor Masia holds significant editorial roles with several prestigious journals, IEEE TRO, IEEE RAL, IEEE TNSRE, JNER and Wearable Technologies. He has also played key roles as Program Chair in organizing major IEEE RAS conferences in the field, and he has been the General Chair for IEEE RAS EMBS BIOROB 2024 (1-4 September 2024, Heidelberg, Germany).

Wolf-Julian Neumann is a medical doctor and Professor for Invasive Neurotechnology at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, with over 15 years of experience in translational invasive neurotechnology, including the design and execution of human experiments and the acquisition and analysis of invasive brain recordings from more than 500 patients with neurological and psychiatric disorders. His work focuses on the development of computational methods for brain-signal decoding, combining signal processing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to derive clinically meaningful biomarkers and control strategies for neuromodulation.

From May 2026 he will assume the position Head of AI Innovation and Therapeutic Neurotechnology, where he steers an interinstitutional neurotechnology platform spanning AI-ready data infrastructure, large-scale clinical deployment, and pathways toward regulatory approval and commercialization of next-generation neurotechnological therapies.