Archives: Committee Members

Dr. Tracy Cui is William Kepler Whiteford Professor of Bioengineering at the University of Pittsburgh.  Dr. Cui is the Director of the Neural Tissue/Electrode Interface and Neural Tissue Engineering Lab.  She is also the Neural Engineering Track Coordinator for the Department of Bioengineering Graduate Committee. Prior to this she was a Research Scientist at Unilever Research US in Edgewater, New Jersey.

Dr. Cui earned her BE in Polymer Materials and Chemical Engineering and her MS in Biophysics at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China.  She went on to earn her PhD in Macromolecular Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan.

In the Dr. Cui’s lab, the primary research focus is on the interactions between neural tissue and smart biomaterials with special focuses on neural electrode-tissue interface, neural tissue engineering, central nervous system drug delivery, and biosensors.  She has led many multidisciplinary federally funded projects, which produced a strong publication record with an h-index of 51 and over 8700 citations (Google Scholar)

For her work, Dr. Cui has won numerous awards, most recently:

• 2017 Fellow of Royal Society of Chemistry in 2017.
• 2016 Fellow of American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering
• 2013 and 2014 Peking University Engineering Globex Fellow
• 2013 Carnegie Science Emerging Female Scientist Award
• 2009, 2011 and 2015 Pitt Innovator Award
• 2008 National Science Foundation Career Award
• 2005 Wallace Coulter Foundation Translational Early Career Award

She serves as a grant agency reviewer for the National Institute of Health, National Science Foundation, National Research Agency of France, Science Foundation of Ireland, European Research Council and the American Institute of Biological Sciences.  Dr. Cui holds 6 granted U.S. patents, and she is a reviewer for many prestigious journals, such as Science, Nature Communication, ACS Nano, Advanced Materials, Advanced Functional Materials, Biomaterials, Acta Biomaterialia, Biosensors and Bioelectronics, Journal of Neural Engineering amongst others.  Dr. Cui is on the editorial board of the Journal of Materials Chemistry B, Journal of Neural Engineering, Current Opinion in Biomedical Engineering and Advanced NanoBiomed Research.

Dr. Proctor leads the Bionic Systems Group in the Engineering Department at the University of Cambridge. He received a B.Sc. in Interdisciplinary Physics from the University of Michigan in 2008. Following two years as a general scientist at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, he earned a Ph.D. in Materials from the University of California, Santa Barbara where he investigated loss mechanisms in organic photovoltaics (2015). Subsequently, Chris was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from Whitaker International to develop implantable bioelectronic devices for treating neurological disorders in the Bioelectronics Department at the Ecole des Mines de St Etienne. He then joined the University of Cambridge as a Research Associate and Borysiewicz Biomedical Sciences Fellow. In 2020, Chris started as a BBSRC David Phillips Fellow and group leader in the Engineering Department.

1981: Joined Yamatake-Honeywell (now as Azbil Corporation) as a research and development engineer in Japan

1984: Research scientist at Honeywell Minneapolis, U.S.A research center

1985 to 2017: Products development including advanced R&D

Major products development includes a thin film platinum temperature sensor for building automation, a MEMS based micro flow sensor for industrial automation, a MEMS based sapphire capacitance manometer for semiconductor industry, and a valve positioner for plant automation

2007: Received Ph.D. from Tokyo University of Science

2005 to current:  Corporate research and development strategy planning.

Industrial design management (Design thinking and User Experience based design)

Prof. Luis Pereira was born in Lisbon, Portugal, in 1977. He received the Engineering degree in Materials Science in 2001 and has finished the PhD in Microelectronics and Optoelectronics in 2008 at Universidade Nova de Lisboa. The PhD work was focused on polycrystalline silicon and high k dielectrics for TFT’s application.

The pos-doc activities were focused on the development of printed inorganic nanostructured materials for chromogenic, electronic and electrochemical devices on paper and plastic substrates. He was involved in the team that demonstrated for the first-time transistors made of oxides with paper acting as gate dielectric. He has authored and co-authored more than 180 publications in peer-reviewed journals and proceedings of the ISI with more than 10000 citations.

He was Professor at Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia/Universidade Nova de Lisboa (FCT/UNL) from 2012 to 2020 where he has coordinated and participated in several R&D projects under different funding schemes, including industry direct funding ones. He has been granted in 2015 with a Starting Grant of the European Research Council (ERC) on the development of cellulose nanocomposites for paper electronics (New-Fun, project 640598). Recent research interests were on the design and synthesis of 1D, 2D and 3D inorganic and hybrid nanostructures, chiral cellulose nanocomposites, functional micro and nanofibers and its integration on chromogenic, electronic and electrochemical devices.

Nowadays he is member of the board of Portuguese Professional Engineer Association – South Region, Vice-president of the TCM-Net (Transparent Conductive Materials Network), and member of the board of the Portuguese Materials Society (SPM), invited Associate Professor at FCT/UNL, and associate researcher at CENIMAT/I3N.

Hyunhyub Ko is a professor of Energy and Chemical Engineering at Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST). He joined the UNIST as an assistant professor in 2010. He received his PhD in Materials Science and Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology in 2008. From 2008 to 2010, he worked at University of California, Berkeley as a postdoctoral fellow in the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences. His research interests are in the area of functional nanomaterials for flexible electronics, sensors, and energy devices.