Prof. Ilangko Balasingham (male) First Time FET Participant, received the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from the Department of Electronic Systems, NTNU in 1993 and 1998, respectively, both in signal processing and wireless communications. He performed his Master’s degree thesis at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California Santa Barbara, USA. He co-founded Fast Search & Transfer ASA in Oslo in 1998 and worked there as a R&D Engineer developing image and video streaming solutions for mobile handheld devices until 2002. The company was later acquired by Microsoft Inc. for 1 billion US$ and was named as Microsoft Development Center Norway. Since 2002 he has been with the Intervention Center, Oslo University Hospital, where he heads the Wireless Biomedical Sensor Network Research Group. He was appointed Full Professor of Medical Signal Processing and Communications at NTNU in 2006. For the academic year 2016/2017 he was Professor by courtesy at the Frontier Institute, Nagoya Institute of Technology in Japan.
Ilangko’s lab has expertise in nanoscale communication technologies, wireless communication system, antenna design, statistical signal processing and machine learning, and clinical medicine. His research interests include super robust short range communications for both in-body and on-body sensors, body area sensor network, microwave short range sensing of vital signs, short range localization and tracking mobile sensors, and nanoscale communication networks.
Ilangko has supervised 16 Postdocs, 10 PhDs and 25 Master students and has a group of 4 Postdocs and 7 PhD students. He has authored or co-authored over 220 journal and full conference papers, 7 book chapters, 42 abstracts, 5 patents, and 16 articles in popular press, and has given 16 keynotes at the international conferences. According to Google scholar he has 2200 citations and H-index of 25. He also is active in organizing conferences (Steering Committee Member of ACM NANOCOM 2018-2021; General Chair: the 2019 IEEE Int. Symposium of Medical ICT, the 2012 Body Area Networks (BODYNETS) conference; TPC Chair of the 2015 ACM NANOCOM) and serving in the editorial boards (Area Editor of Elsevier Nano Communication Networks and Guest Editor of IEEE J. of Biomedical and Health Informatics).
Dr. Christopher Contag (male) First Time FET Participant is an Adjunct Professor of Biomedical Engineering at NTNU. He joined Michigan State University in 2017 as the founding director of the Institute for Quantitative Health Science and Engineering (IQ) and the inaugural chair of the new Department of Biomedical Engineering in the College of Engineering. He is also a professor in the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics. As professor emeritus in the department of pediatrics at Stanford University he maintains connections to various programs and departments at Stanford. Dr. Contag received his B.S. in Biology from the University of Minnesota, St. Paul in 1982. He received his Ph.D. in Microbiology from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis in 1988, where he did his dissertation research on the topic of viral infections of the central nervous system. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University from 1990-1994 in the Department of Microbiology where he studied mother-to-infant transmission of HIV, and then joined the faculty in Pediatrics at Stanford in 1995 with a joint appointment in Microbiology and Immunology and courtesy appointments in Bioengineering and Radiology. Dr. Contag served as the Associate Chief of the Division of Neonatal and Developmental Medicine, the director of Stanford’sCenter for Innovation in In Vivo Imaging (SCI3) and co-director of both the Molecular Imaging Program at Stanford (MIPS) and Child Health Research Institute (CHRI) at Stanford University. Dr. Contag has developed and used noninvasive imaging approaches to reveal molecular processes in living subjects, to understand host pathogen interactions, to advance diagnostic and therapeutic strategies for cancer, and to reveal the nuances of stem cell engraftment and expansion. The initial imaging tools imaged biological functions at the macroscopic scale and this has led to a need to develop tools for imaging at the microscopic scale—these include miniature confocal microscopes that reach into the body for early diagnosis, and Raman-based endoscopes. Dr. Contag’s work with extracellular vesicles (EVs), exosomes and micro-vesicles, has focused on their biological and diagnostic relevance as well as engineering EVs as drug delivery systems. Dr. Contag is a founding member, and past president of the Society for Molecular Imaging (now part of WMIS) and recent past president and a Fellow of WMIS. For his fundamental contributions in the field of molecular imaging, he was awarded the Achievement Award from the Society for the Molecular Imaging. For his fundamental contributions to the field of optics he was awarded the Britton Chance Award from the International Society for Optics and Photonics (SPIE). Dr. Contag was a founder of Xenogen Corp., now part of PerkinElmer, a company with the mission of commercializing in vivo bioluminescence and fluorescence imaging, and is a founder of BioEclipse Inc., a company aimed at improving cancer immunotherapy, and a founder of PixelGear, a point-of-care pathology company.
Prof. Masamitsu Kanada (male), First Time FET Participant, is an assistant professor at Michigan State University and visiting professor at NTNU. In graduate school, Dr. Kanada studied cell biology and fluorescence live cell imaging in the laboratory of Dr. Taro Q.P. Uyeda at Tsukuba University in Japan. After completing PhD study, He started working in a pharmaceutical company, Oncotherapy Science Inc., developing cancer therapies. As his postdoc training, he learned intravital microscopy and whole body preclinical imaging in the laboratory of Dr. Susumu Terakawa at Hamamatsu University School of Medicine and Dr. Christopher H. Contag at Stanford University. His research focus is to address questions in cancer biology using multidisciplinary approaches. He is currently advancing the understanding of extracellular vesicle (EV)-mediated cell-to-cell communication, and engineering EVs to create a novel gene delivery system.
Prof. Ali Khaleghi (male), First Time FET Participant received B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees from AmirKabir University of Technology (AUT) and Iran University of Science and Technology (IUST) in Electrical and Telecommunication engineering in 1997 and 1999, respectively. He worked for two years with Iran Electronic Industries as satellite system designer. He received Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Paris South (Paris XII) at the École Supérieure d'électricité (SUPELEC), Paris, France in 2006. He was a postdoctoral researcher at the Institut d' Eectronique et de Télécommunications de Renne (IETR) and was postdoctoral at the IVS- Oslo University Hospital for four years. He was visiting researcher at the biomedical department of the Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden. He was appointed as Associate Professor of Telecommunication Engineering Department at K.N.Toosi University of Technology (KNTU), Tehran, Iran in 2010. He taught four different courses for graduate and undergraduate students. He has supervised 22 Master thesis, and 21 bachelor projects also is supervisor for two PhD students. He has granted more than ten R&D projects during his career at KNTU with a total value of 1.5 M€. He has established Wireless Terminal Test Lab (WTT) at KNTU where he is the head of the Lab. He distinguished as the best researcher of KNTU in 2013 and 2014. He was the head of the telecommunication group in 2012-2013. From, 2014, he is an adjunct professor at KNTU and researcher at Norwegian University of Technology and Oslo University Hospital. He is expertise in electromagnetic and waves propagation, antenna design, electromagnetic compatibility (EMC), signal processing, measurement techniques and bio-electromagnetics. He has authored over 85 journal and full conference papers, 2 book chapters, 3 patents. He was a member of organiser committee for BODYNETS in 2012. According to Google Scholar, he has 893 citations and H-index of 17.