The role of the communications committee is to facilitate and enhance communications between the society and the membership through the newsletter, Facebook and Twitter.
Heather Bortfeld, Chair, is a Professor of Psychological Sciences at the University of California, Merced. Her research focuses on typical language development and language learning under adverse listening conditions. Since 2002, she has been employing near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) to assess the relation between speech processing and brain function in healthy human infants. Since 2007, together with a pediatric cochlear implant team based at Stanford Medical School, she has been applying NIRS to track changes in cortical hemodynamics in deaf children prior to and following cochlear implantation, and how that relates to their language outcomes.
Ippeita Dan, Chair, is a Professor at Chuo University in Japan..
Sabrina Brigadoi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Developmental Psychology at the University of Padova, Italy. Her research focuses on advancing the applicability of diffuse optical techniques in both infant and adult populations, with particular interest in signal processing techniques, image reconstruction and head model development. Furthermore, she is interested in employing fNIRS to study cognitive functions in both adults and infants.
Rens Burghardt is a PhD Candidate in Surgery at the Department of Otorhinolaryngology, Head and Neck Surgery and member of the Brain and Mind Institute, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research interests mainly lie in employing functional brain imaging to answer ongoing questions in communication sciences and disorders. Rens his work focuses particularly on employing fNIRS to uncover the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying hearing and hearing-related problems as well as applying these findings to improving hearing healthcare through machine learning applications.
Adam Eggebrecht is an Assistant Professor of Radiology in the Optical Radiology Laboratory at the Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri, USA. His research is focused on developing diffuse optical tomography systems for basic research and clinical questions about human brain function. Adam is particularly interested in clinically relevant questions about brain development and how it is altered in autism as well as in brain plasticity and how it may be harnessed in recovery from a stroke in adult and pediatric populations.
Louisa Gosse is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development at Birkbeck – University of London, UK. Her research focuses on understanding the association between sleep and neurocognitive development by recording simultaneous fNIRS-EEG during infant sleep. Furthermore, she is also interested in wearable fNIRS-EEG systems and how these combined systems can be used to study development in infants and toddlers.
Xiao-Su Hu (Frank) is an Assistant Research Scientist at the School of Dentistry at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on developing new methods for localization of fNIRS probes, preprocessing (motion corrections) and statistical analysis of pediatric and adult fNIRS data. Together with collaborators, he also contributed to applying fNIRS technique to a large range of functional neuroimaiging applications, clinical or non-clinical.
Samuel Antonio Montero-Hernández is a postdoctoral fellow in the Optical Bioimaging Lab led by Dr. Luca Pollonini at the University of Houston. His research interests are focused on developing methods and algorithms for the evaluation of the quality of biosignals and the analysis of brain connectivity with applications to optical and biomedical imaging.
Sérgio Novi is a PhD Candidate in the Laboratory of Biomedical Optics at the University of Campinas, Brazil. In April 2022, he will be moving to Canada as a post-doc at the Western University in London. His research focuses on developing methods for functional connectivity involving multimodal neuroimaging with NIRS by employing a complex system’s approach. Over the last years, he has also contributed on applying novel time-series methods for functional NIRS in a variety of problems.
Yumie Ono is a Professor at School of Science and Technology, Meiji University, Japan. Her research interest is medical application of noninvasive functional brain imaging techniques of EEG, MEG, and fNIRS in diagnosis and rehabilitation. She is also conducting a research of diffuse correlation spectroscopy (DCS), a measurement of blood flow speed in the living tissue.
Felipe Orihuela-Espina is an associate professor at the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham in UK. His research interests are data analysis and interpretation of neuroimages; mostly optical neuroimaging (fNIRS) but also to a smaller extent EEG and fMRI. He aims to develop alternative approaches to neuroimage interpretation using computational, statistical and topological elements.
Guy Perkins is a PhD candidate as part of the Physical Sciences for Health Centre for doctoral training at the University of Birmingham, UK. His research has been about developing frequency domain (FD) near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) and diffuse optical tomography (DOT) measurements and applying this to assessing traumatic brain injury. He has investigated the use of multi-frequency FD HD-DOT on simulations, phantoms and healthy subjects in the lab at the Centre for Human Brain Health. He is involved in the ongoing RED-DIAMOND study based at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital to use FD-DOT to assess blood brain barrier damage and cerebral perfusion in severe traumatic brain injury patients in the intensive care unit.
Luca Pollonini is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Engineering Technology at the University of Houston. His research interest is in development of NIRS instruments and analytical methods for functional brain imaging and tissue oxygenation. In addition, he is interested in functional brain connectivity and multimodal integration of fNIRS and EEG.
Felix Scholkmann is a lecturer at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and a research associate at the Biomedical Optics Research Laboratory of the University Hospital Zurich, University of Zurich, Switzerland as well as at the University of Bern, Switzerland. His research focuses on biomedical signal processing, biomedical optics (development and application of functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) for human optical neuroimaging), neuroscience, integrative human physiology and biophysics.
Meryem Ayşe Yücel is an Instructor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School and an Assistant in Biomedical Engineering at Massachusetts General Hospital. She is an active contributor to the evolving field of fNIRS research and has directed and performed various fNIRS human imaging studies at the MGH Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, including fNIRS assessment of pain during surgery and bedside monitoring of patients with epilepsy. Her current research interests span functional neuroimaging and cognitive science.