Diversity: a story of success

Abstract

Nature teaches that diversity drives evolution. During this speech, Prof. Menegaz will provide a holistic perspective on the importance of diversity in many respects, inspired by well-known naturalistic concepts and providing hints for possibly shaping them to the Academic context. This will constitute the basis for introducing some more concrete challenges that can hinder the path of bright researchers and humble advice on how to keep the rudder straight.

Speaker Biography

Gloria Menegaz is Professor of Bioengineering at the Dept. of Computer Science, University of Verona (Italy), where she leads the BraiNAVLab. She holds a PhD in Applied Sciences (EPFL 2000), a MSc in Electronic Engineer (1993) and a post-grade Master's in information technology (1995) (Politecnico di Milano, Italy). From 2000 to 2002 she was first research assistant at the Telecommunications Lab (LCAV) of EPFL, that she left to join the Computer Science Dept. of the University of Fribourg (Switzerland) as an Assistant Professor. In 2004 she was awarded the Rita Levi Montalcini grant by the Italian Ministry of University and Research (MIUR)(DM 20/03/2003 n. 501) and joined the Dept. of Information Engineering of the University of Siena (Italy) as an Assistant Professor. In 2007 she joined the Dept. of Computer Science of the University of Verona (Italy) as an Associate Professor in Computer Science and became full Professor in Computer Science in 2017 and Professor in Bioengineering (ING-INF/06) in 2021. Prof. Menegaz is a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE, 2017, valued member 1995-2017), and member of the IEEE Woman in Engineering since 2000. She is a member of the Signal Processing Society (SPS) and the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS), Liason representative of the IEEE-SPS at the IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging (TMI), Member of the Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention Society (MICCAI) Special Interest Group on Biomedical Image Analysis Challenges (SIG-BIAC) and co-chair of the TC on Challenges & Data Collections (CDC) of the IEEE Bioimaging and Signal Processing (BISP) Technical Committee). She is also a Member of the Ad Hoc Group (AHG) on Digital Media Storage using DNA (JPEG-DNA) and Observer for the DICOM WG-32 (Neurophysiology data). She is Associate Editor for IEEE-SPL, Editorial Board Member of Scientific Reports (Nature portfolio), Guest Editor of the IEEE-SPM and Review Editor for Frontiers journal on Computational BioImaging (Front. in Bioinformatics) and Computer Vision. She has been Vice-Chair for the FET-REA and the MSCA-IF for many years and Independent Expert for many international funding Institutions. She authored more than 120 publications in international journals and conference proceedings and one patent, has organized many Special Sessions and served as chair, area chair and technical committee member for many international conferences, especially of the IEEE. Prof. Menegaz holds a highly interdisciplinary profile. Her research activity on neuroimaging, imaging genetics and numerical biomarker discovery relying on classical and AI (statistical/machine/deep learning) focusing on explainable methods.