Biomedical Engineering

In this panel session two distinguished University of Toronto professors in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering will discuss the emerging research trends and career opportunities within the field of Biomedical Engineering. Short presentations of current research in this area will include an introduction to the ChipCare project (http://www.chipcare.ca/), which can provide portable HIV testing in minutes, and an overview of the work being done within the area of Neural, Sensory Systems and Rehabilitation Research within the Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering. This includes Brain-Computer Interfaces, Novel Assistive Technologies, and Speech Enhancement and Hearing Assistive Devices.

Part of the session will also focus on career opportunities within this area and pathways through undergraduate engineering education for such careers.

Biography

Professor Willy Wong

Willy Wong received his B.Sc. in physics from the University of Toronto in 1992. Following this, he pursued his masters and doctoral degrees in physics and biomedical engineering with Professor Ken Norwich through the collaborative program at the Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering (IBBME) at U of T. His graduate work was on physics approach to sensory information processing. Since then he was a visiting scientist at universities in Toyama (Japan), Cambridge (U.K.) and Eindhoven (The Netherlands) working with such notable sensory scientists as Horace Barlow and Adrian Houtsma. Since 2000, he joined the ECE department at U of T as faculty member. Dr. Wong's research focuses on neural engineering, biomedical signal processing and on sensory physics, with particular emphasis on characterizing brain electrical activity, elucidating underlying mechanisms and building associated medical devices. He was a past recipien t of several teaching awards.

Professor J. Stewart Aitchison

J. Stewart Aitchison received a B.Sc., with first class honors, and a Ph.D. from the Physics Department, Heriot-Watt University, in 1984 and 1987, respectively. His dissertation research was on optical bistability in semiconductor waveguides.

From 1988 to 1990 he was a Postdoctoral Member of Technical Staff at Bellcore, Red Bank, NJ (USA). His research interests were in high nonlinearity glasses and spatial optical solitons. In 2001 he became a holder of the Nortel Institute chair in Emerging Technology, in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. From 2004 to 2007 he was the director of the Emerging Communications Technology Institute (ECTI) and served as the Vice Dean for Research in the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering from 2007 - 2012.

Prof. Aitchison is the author and co-author of over 250 refereed journal and conference papers. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics (London), a Fellow of the Optical Society of America and a senior member of the IEEE Photonics Society.