Jocelyne Bloch is neurosurgeon at the University Hospital Lausanne (CHUV) where she leads the functional neurosurgery unit, while Grégoire Courtine is a neuroscientist with a background in physics. Jocelyne and Grégoire are Professor within the NeuroX institute of the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), within the neurosurgical department of CHUV, and at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Lausanne (UNIL). Together, they founded the Defitech Center for Interventional Neurotherapies, named .NeuroRestore, which develop bioengineering strategies involving neurosurgical interventions to restore neurological functions. In 2014, they also co-founded ONWARD Medical (Euronext: ONWD) with the aim to translate the neurotherapies developed at .NeuroRestore into clinical treatments. Jocelyne and Grégoire are known worldwide for the conception of neuroprosthetic implants that restored walking in people with chronic paralysis.

Robert Gaunt is an Associate Professor of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at the University of Pittsburgh. He holds a BEng in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Victoria and a PhD in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Alberta. Dr. Gaunt’s research focuses on neuroprosthetics for sensorimotor control of the hand and bladder, aiming to restore function after injury or disease. His work includes developing brain-computer interfaces to enable movement and sensation for those with upper-limb paralysis and creating neural interfaces to regulate bladder function. Recognized by the National Academy of Engineering, his research has been featured widely in media, and he holds multiple patents.

Dr. Bo Hong received his Ph.D. degree of Biomedical Engineering from Tsinghua University in 2001. From 2004 to 2005, he was a visiting scientist in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Center for Neural Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, USA. He is now full professor with School of Biomedical Engineering, Tsinghua University, and an investigator of McGovern Institute for Brain Research at Tsinghua. His main research interests are brain computer interface and language network in human brain. His team designed and developed minimally invasive BCI – NEO system and conducted the first-in-human clinical trial successfully in 2023. He has co-authored more than 80 papers on Nature Neuroscience, PNAS, Nature Communications, NeuroImage, Journal of Neuroscience etc. He has served as the Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering and IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering.

Dr. Cory Inman is the director of the Immersive Neuromodulation and Neuroimaging (INMAN) Laboratory in the Psychology Department at the University of Utah. He received his BA in Psychology from Georgia State University and his PhD from Emory University. He completed his first postdoctoral fellowship in the Neurosurgery department at Emory University and a second postdoctoral fellowship at UCLA. He has broad interests in helping to establish approaches that push our understanding of emotion and memory from the laboratory into the wild, real world. The INMAN Lab is currently undertaking studies examining the use of direct brain stimulation to the human amygdala for episodic memory enhancement and direct brain recordings of deep memory structures, like the hippocampus during, navigation and autobiographical memory encoding in real-world settings. Outside the lab, he spends his time playing with his 2 kids, playing guitar, playing basketball, and exploring as many outdoor adventures as possible including white water rafting, snowboarding, hiking, and climbing.

Camille Jeunet-Kelway 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. In 2021, she has joined the institute for cognitive and integrative neurosciences (INCIA) in Bordeaux, where she leads 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-Kelway has received 3 PhD awards, the European Label as well as 5 national fundings from the French research agency for her research. In 2022 she was awarded the Early Career Award in neuroscience from the BCI Society. Since 2024, she is deputy head of the SMART reasearch and innovation plateform, an “intelligent, connected gym”, dedicated to sports and movement sciences.

Bao-Liang Lu received his PhD in electrical engineering from Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan, in 1994. Since August 2002, he has been a full professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China. He currently serves as the Director for the Center for Brain-Like Computing and Machine Intelligence, the Key Laboratory of Shanghai Education Commission Intelligent Interaction and Cognitive Engineering, and Ruijin-Mihoyo Laboratory. He received the 2018 IEEE Transactions on Autonomous Mental Development Outstanding Paper Award and the 2021 Best of IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing Paper Collection. He is also the Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing and Journal of Neural Engineering and an IEEE Fellow. His research interests include deep learning, large EEG model, emotion artificial intelligence, and affective brain-computer interface.

Prof. Dr. Natalie Mrachacz-Kersting, a member of IEEE, received her Ph.D. degree in biomedical engineering from Aalborg University in 2005. She currently holds the Chair for Neuroscience and Neuroscience in Sport at the Albert-Ludwigs University of Freiburg and is a member of the BrainLinks-BrainTools Cluster of Excellence at IMBIT, Albert-Ludwigs University of Freiburg. Dr. Mrachacz-Kersting serves on the Executive Committee of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS) as the Vice President-elect for Member and Student Activities. She is also the Chair of the IEEE Women in Biomedical Engineering (WI(BM)E), member of the Steering Committee of IEEE Brain Technical Community, and the Deputy Editor-in Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering Journal. She has previously held positions at Aalborg University in Denmark, FH Dortmund in Germany, and the University of Auckland in New Zealand. Dr. Mrachacz Kersting’s research focuses on medical technology, biomedical engineering, and neuroscience. She has authored over 80 peer-reviewed journal articles, more than 130 conference papers and abstracts, ten book chapters, and one book. Her current projects primarily involve Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) for patient populations, including those suffering from stroke or ALS. Dr. Mrachacz-Kersting received several awards including the international BCI award in 2017.

Mu-ming Poo is the Scientific Director of Institute of Neuroscience, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Director of Shanghai Center for Brain Science and Brain-Inspired Technology, and Paul Licht Distinguished Professor in Biology Emeritus at University of California, Berkeley. He studied physics at Tsinghua University in Taiwan and received PhD in biophysics from Johns Hopkins University in 1974. During 1976-2012, He had served on the faculty of UC Irvine, Yale, Columbia, and UCSD, and UC Berkeley. He was the founding director of Institute of Neuroscience, CAS (1999-2019), and a member of Chinese Academy of Science, Academia Sinica, and Hong Kong Academy of Science, and an international member of US National Academy of Science. He was awarded Ameritec Prize, International Science & Technology Cooperation Award of P. R. China, and Gruber Neuroscience Prize. Poo’s research interest includes axon growth, synaptic plasticity, and the use non-human primates to study higher cognitive functions and human brain disorders. He is the Executive Editor-in-Chief of National Science Review and the editorial board member for many journals, including Neuron and Progress in Neurobiology.

Dr. Ying Mao is a highly respected neurosurgeon at Huashan Hospital in Shanghai, China. He now serves as the director of the National Center for Neurological Disorders, the chairman-designate of the Neurosurgery Section of the Chinese Medical Association and the president of Huashan Hospital. With years of experience under his belt, Dr. Mao is known for his expertise in treating complex neurological conditions and performing advanced brain surgeries. Patients appreciate his compassionate approach and his dedication to staying at the forefront of medical technology and techniques. Beyond the operating room, Dr. Mao is an avid researcher, contributing significantly to the field of neurosurgery with numerous publications and studies. He’s also a beloved mentor, guiding the next generation of neurosurgeons with his wealth of knowledge and experience. When he’s not working, Dr. Mao enjoys spending time with his family, exploring new culinary delights, and indulging in a good book. His commitment to his patients, coupled with his warm personality, makes him a standout figure in the medical community.

Alexander von Lühmann is currently head of the “Intelligent Biomedical Sensing” research group at TU Berlin’s Machine Learning department and BIFOLD. He is also a visiting researcher at the Neurophotonics Center of Boston University (BU NPC) and the Lead Technology Advisor at NIRx Medical Technologies. Before this, he was the Chief Science Officer and R&D Director at NIRx for 2,5 years, a post-doc at Boston University, a visiting researcher at Harvard Medical School, and the Chief Technology

Officer at Crely, a healthcare startup based in the US and Singapore. He is a member of the ISO/DIN, SfNIRS, OPTICA, OHBM and VDI. His contributions to the field have been recognized by the fNIRS Society (Early Investigator Award 2022), the TU Berlin BIMOS graduate school (PhD Award 2019), the German Society for Biomedical Engineering (DGBMT Klee Award 2018) and the IEEE Biomedical Engineering Society (Special Feature & Cover Article 2017). He received his PhD (Dr.-Ing.) with distinction in 2018 from TU Berlin, and his M.Sc. and B.Sc. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in 2014/11.

Enming Song is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Optoelectronics, Fudan University. Previously, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University’s Simpson Querrey Institute and an Adjunct Research Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign. He earned his Ph.D. and B.S. from Fudan University’s Department of Materials Science. His research focuses on soft electronic materials for biomedical engineering, particularly flexible bioelectronic systems for neural interfaces. Over the past five years, he has published 21 scientific papers and holds a U.S. patent. His contributions earned him honors like MIT Technology Review’s Innovators Under 35 Asia Pacific, Shanghai Science & Technology 35 Under 35, and a Global Innovation Award from UNIDO.

Minpeng Xu received the B. S. and Ph. D. degrees in biomedical engineering from Tianjin University in 2010 and 2015, respectively. He visited the Tzyy-Ping Jung’s lab at the Institute for Neural Computation (INC) of University of California, San Diego (UCSD) from 2014 to 2015. He is currently the Associate Dean of Academy of Medical Engineering and Translational Medicine and Chair Professor of Department of Biomedical Engineering at Tianjin University. His research interests include brain-computer interface, neural signal processing and neuromodulation. He has published more than 80 academic papers as the (co-)first or (co-)corresponding author, and some of them were selected as ESI highly cited papers, IEEE TBME cover story, and JNE highlight.

Yuxiao Yang is an Assistant Professor at the MOE Frontier Science Center for Brain Science and Brain-machine Integration and the State Key Laboratory of Brain-machine Intelligence, Zhejiang University. Prior to joining Zhejiang University, he was an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at the University of Central Florida (UCF).  He received a Ph.D. degree in ECE from University of Southern California in 2019 and received a B.S. degree in Electronics Engineering from Tsinghua University in 2013.His research centers on designing closed-loop brain-machine interface systems for neural decoding and control, aiming to provide new therapies for neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders. He has published in prestigious neural engineering journals, including cover articles in Nature Biotechnology and Nature Biomedical Engineering. He received the Annual Brain Computer Interface Award in 2019 and the IEEE EMBS Best Student Paper Award in 2015.

Professor Cuntai Guan is a President’s Chair in Computer Science and Engineering and Deputy Dean of the College of Computing & Data Science at the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He is the Director of the Centre for BrainComputing Research, Director of the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, CoDirector of S-Lab for Advanced Intelligence, and Co-Director of the Rehabilitation Research Institute of Singapore. His research interests include Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI), Machine Learning, Neural Signal & Image Processing, and Artificial Intelligence. He is a recipient of several awards owing to his contributions to Brain Computer Interface research.

Dr. Christian Herff is an assistant professor in the Mental Health and Neuroscience Research Institute at Maastricht University where he leads the Neural Interfacing Lab. His research interest lays in the application of machine learning technology to neurophysiological data for Brain-Computer Interfaces and neuroscience research. With a particular focus on the decoding of speech processes from intracranial data, he tries to improve the lives of severely paralyzed patients while simultaneously improving our understanding of complex higher order cognition. He emphasizes the ability to achieve interpretable results based on computational models. In particular, visualization of complex dynamic models, such as deep neural networks, is of interest to him.

Dean Krusienski is a Professor and Graduate Program Director of Biomedical Engineering at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia, where

he also directs the Advanced Signal Processing in Engineering and Neuroscience (ASPEN) Laboratory. He has co-authored over 100 peer-reviewed publications related to advancing brain-computer interface and neural signal analysis techniques, which have collectively received over 11,900 citations. His lab’s work has been funded by NSF, NIH, NASA/NIA and DoD, including current projects on intracranial speech decoding and synthesis; closed-loop DBS; biomarkers of hippocampal and sleep pathologies; user-state estimation; visual, auditory, and memory processing; and virtual reality applications.

Dr. Yan Li serves as the Executive Director of Scientific Programs at the Tianqiao Chen & Chrissy Luo Institute (TCCI®). She oversees the daily management of the Institute’s initiatives and fosters strong communications with beneficiary organizations and individuals. In addition to collaborating with cornerstone partners, Yan is spearheading the development of programs that empower researchers at all stages of their careers, advancing the overarching mission of the foundation to drive innovation and discovery. Dr. Li received her Ph.D. in Neuroscience at the Institute of Neuroscience, Chinese Academy of Sciences at Shanghai. She spent six years as a postdoctoral fellow at Profession Fred H. Gage’s lab at the Salk Institute and then moved to Stanford where she worked with Professor Thomas Sudhof and Marius Wernig for two years. Prior to joining Chen Institute, Dr. Li worked at a startup company at Menlo Park, California.

Mariska Vansteensel is an Assistant Professor at the UMC Utrecht Brain Center in Utrecht. Her main research goal is to use the wealth of neuroscientific knowledge directly for the benefit of people with disease or disability. The main focus of her research since 2007 has been the development and validation of implantable electrocorticography (ECoG)-based Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI) for communication in individuals with severe motor and speech impairment. She has conducted research on the proof of concept, working with epilepsy patients who receive ECoG electrodes for diagnostic purposes and on the first worldwide investigation of the use of fully implantable BCIs in settings of daily living of people with severe motor impairment.

Theresa Vaughan is a research scientist with thirty years of experience in clinical research studies, 25 years focused specifically on brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) as new communication channels for people with severe motor disabilities. Her laboratory supervised the first-ever large-scale trial of independent home use of a BCI by people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). This work has become the foundation of the National Center for Adaptive Neurotechnologies (NCAN) translational service project program. To accomplish this, they have developed and tested hardware; modified the BCI2000 software; developed a range of Windows-based applications; produced training tools for therapists, caregivers, and users; and designed software.

Tao Hu is a researcher and deputy director at the Shanghai Institute of Microsystemand Information Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and director of the StateKey Laboratory of Transducer Technology. He chairs the Brain-Computer Interfaceand Interaction Branch of the Chinese Society for Neuroscience and oversees theBCI industrial roadmap for the China Association for Science and Technology. He hasreceived numerous awards, including the Shanghai Young Scientists OutstandingContribution Award (2020), CAS Young Scientist Award (2021), and Best Paper Awardat IEEE MEMS 2022. Recognized as a “Highly Cited Chinese Scholar” and among the“Top 2% Scientists in the World,” he is also a celebrated mentor and public sciencecommunicator.

Jianjun Meng is an associate professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU,2019–present). He earned his Bachelor’s and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineeringat SJTU and conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Minnesota andCarnegie Mellon University (2014–2019). His research focuses on noninvasive brain-computer interface (BCI), neural prosthetics, biomedical signal processing, andneural engineering. He has over 40 SCI-indexed publications in journals like ScienceRobotics and NeuroImage and co-authored a book chapter in Neural Engineering.A senior IEEE member, he is an associate editor for IEEE biomedical journals. Hereceived China’s Ministry of Education First Prize in Natural Science and is part ofthe Shanghai Pujiang Talent Program.