EVANGELIA MICHELI-TZANAKOU is Professor II and Director of the Computational Intelligence Laboratories (www.cil.rutgers.edu) in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Rutgers and an adjunct professor of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. Dr Tzanakou was Chair of the Department for 10 years and established the Undergraduate curriculum in the same. She is a Founding Fellow of AIMBE, a Fellow of IEEE and a Fellow of the New Jersey Academy of Medicine. Her new book “Supervised and Unsupervised Pattern Recognition: Feature Extraction and Computational Intelligence” was recently published by CRC Press in January 2000. Dr. Tzanakou co-authored a book with S. Deutsch on "Neuroelectric Systems", published by New York University Press, in 1987. She has published over 250 scientific papers in journals, conference proceedings and book chapters. 

 

Dr. Tzanakou has established the first ever experimental Brain to Computer Interface (BCI), using the ALOPEX algorithm, in 1974. This method is now used for target optimization in Parkinson’s disease. ALOPEX has also been used in a wide variety of problems: signal processing, image processing, pattern recognition, transportation and many more.

 

 Dr. Tzanakou is Book Series Editor in Biomedical Engineering for Kluwer/Plenum Publishing. Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks, on the editorial board of the IEEE Transactions on Information Technology, the editorial board of the IEEE Transactions On Nano-bio-sciences and the editorial board of the new journal “Biomedical Engineering on-line”. She has served as Vice President of the IEEE Neural Networks Council.  She was the President of the Neural Networks and Chair of the IEEE Awards Board in 2003.

 

Dr. Tzanakou has received several awards including: an Outstanding Advisor Award in 1985 from IEEE, in 1992 the Achievement Award of the Society of Women Engineers, and in 1995 she was awarded the NJ Women of Achievement Award for the application of neural networks to engineering in medicine and biology. Her research interests include Neural Networks, Information Processing in the brain, Image and Signal Processing applied to Biomedicine, Mammography, Telemedicine, Hearing Aids and electronic equivalents of neurons. She has graduated 38 Masters and PhDs and currently supervises 12 graduate students.