Strategic Vision Committee

Prof. Joseph P. Culver, Ph.D. is the Sherwood Moore Professor of Radiology, at Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis Missouri, US.  Prof. Culver’s group focuses on developing neurophotonic imaging systems and advancing functional mapping paradigms.  Culver’s group developed a series of improvements in high-density diffuse optical tomography (HD-DOT) including high-performance instrumentation, high-density DOT imaging arrays, ergonomic imaging caps and de-noising methods. The resulting increases in resolution and brain specificity relative to previous systems enabled the first optical angular and eccentricity mappings of the human visual cortex along with a collection of language tasks and networks. In parallel, Prof. Culver’s group developed a seminal task-less approach to mapping functional connectivity (FC) patterns in optical recordings of spontaneous brain activity. Their first paper initiated a trend in FC analysis for both DOT and functional near infrared spectroscopy. Together, the FC and HD-DOT methods are enabling a broad range of applied studies, including preterm infants, acute stroke, deep brain stimulation, cochlear implants, and childhood brain development.  More recently Culver’s group has focused on naturalistic mapping paradigms and developing wearable HD-DOT instruments. 

Prof. Judit Gervain is a Full Professor of Developmental Psychology, University of Padua, Italy and a Senior Research Scientist, CNRS, France. Her research focuses early speech perception and language acquisition in typically and atypically developing infants. Her work is published in leading journals, such as Science Advances, Nature Communications, PNAS, Current Biology. She is an associate editor at Developmental Science, Cognition and Neurophotonics. Her work is currently funded by an ERC Consolidator Grant.

Prof. Maria Angela Franceschini, Ph.D. is a Professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School and a leading investigator at the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging. Her work focuses on advancing non‑invasive neurophotonic methods—particularly near‑infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) and diffuse correlation spectroscopy (DCS)—to monitor cerebral oxygenation, blood flow, and metabolism in both research and clinical settings. A pioneer in optical brain monitoring, she has contributed major advances in frequency‑domain NIRS instrumentation, multimodal neuroimaging, and bedside neuromonitoring, including quantitative NIRS/DCS systems widely used to study infant brain development and detect early signs of neurological compromise. More recently, her work has emphasized translation and accessibility, including developing wearable and low‑cost brain‑monitoring technologies such as FlexNIRS to expand the clinical and community impact of optical neuroimaging.

Haijing Niu is an Associate Professor of IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research & National Key Lab of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning at Beijing Normal University, China. She has nearly 15 years of fNIRS research experience since her Ph. D. in 2006. Her early research focused on 3D image reconstruction of diffuse optical tomography imaging. Her current research focuses on the development of human brain network in typical and atypical infants and children using resting-state functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) imaging.

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 fNIRS neuroimages. He aims to develop alternative approaches to neuroimage interpretation using computational, statistical and topological elements

Rickson Mesquita is an Associate Professor at the School of Computer Science of the University of Birmingham, UK, and associate researcher at the Brazilian Institute of Neuroscience and Neurotechnology (BRAINN), Brazil. He graduated in Physics at UNICAMP and obtained his Ph.D. in Science at the same University. He was also a research scholar at the Massachusetts General Hospital and a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. He was a pioneer in diffuse optics for neuroscience applications in Brazil and Latin America. He currently leads the Biomedical Optics Lab at UNICAMP, with research interests focused on designing new instrumentation and developing innovative methods for diffuse optics (both fNIRS and DCS) in biological tissue

Paola Pinti is the senior research laboratory developer at the Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development at Birkbeck, University of London, UK. She completed her training in biomedical engineering at the Marche Polytechnic University in Italy; she then received her PhD in Functional Neuroimaging from the University of Chieti-Pescara, Italy, and held a postdoctoral position at the Department of Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering at University College London. Her research involves the use of fNIRS to study functional brain activity across the lifespan and in combination with other technologies (e.g., VR, systemic physiology, eye-tracking, motion capture, thermal imaging, etc). More precisely, her technical work focuses on the development and implementation of new algorithms and tools for the analysis of fNIRS data collected in more ecologically-valid settings.

Dr. Buckley is an Associate Professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University as well as the Department of Pediatrics at Emory University. She received her PhD from the Department of Physics and Astronomy from the University of Pennsylvania and completed postdoctoral training at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and at Massachusetts General Hospital. Her research focuses on the development, validation, and clinical translation of diffuse optical spectroscopies for monitoring brain health.

Prof. Martin Wolf, Ph.D. is a Professor of Biomedical Optics at the University of Zurich and Head of the Biomedical Optics Research Laboratory at the University Hospital Zurich. His work focuses on developing quantitative optical methods—particularly near‑infrared spectroscopy and related imaging techniques—to measure oxygenation and hemodynamics in the brain, muscle, and other tissues. Trained as an electrical engineer at ETH Zürich, where he also earned his Ph.D., Prof. Wolf has contributed pioneering advances in non‑invasive optical monitoring, spanning continuous‑wave NIRS, multimodal optical imaging, and translational tools for neonatal and adult clinical care. His innovations aim to bring quantitative optical measurements into routine practice, improving early detection and management of brain and tissue compromise -especially in preterm infants. Today, he continues to expand the clinical impact of biomedical optics across diverse fields, integrating engineering, physiology, and translational research to improve patient outcomes through advanced optical technologies.