Grégoire CourtineGrégoire Courtine was originally trained in Mathematics and Physics, but received his PhD degree in Experimental Medicine from the University of Pavia, Italy, and the INSERM Plasticity and Motricity, in France, in 2003. From 2004-2007, he held a Post-doctoral Fellow position at the Brain Research Institute, University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) under the supervision of Dr. Reggie Edgerton, and was a research associate for the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation (CDRF). In 2008, he became Assistant Professor at the faculty of Medicine of the University of Zurich where he established his own research laboratory. In 2012, he was nominated Associate Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) where he holds the International paraplegic foundation (IRP) chair in spinal cord repair at the Center for Neuroprosthetics and the Brain Mind Institute. He published several articles proposing radically new approaches for restoring function after spinal cord injury, which were discussed in national and international press extensively. He received numerous honors and awards such as the 2007 UCLA Chancellors award for excellence in post-doctoral research and the 2009 Schellenberg Prize for his innovative research in spinal cord injury awarded by the International Foundation of Research in Paraplegia.
Maryam KamgarpourMaryam Kamgarpour holds a Doctor of Philosophy in Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley and a Bachelor of Applied Science from University of Waterloo, Canada. Her research is on safe decision-making and control under uncertainty, game theory and mechanism design, mixed integer and stochastic optimization and control. Her theoretical research is motivated by control challenges arising in intelligent transportation networks, robotics, power grid systems and healthcare. She is the recipient of NASA High Potential Individual Award, NASA Excellence in Publication Award, and the European Union (ERC) Starting Grant.