Engineering Innovations for Precision Medicine

José Zariffa, PhD, KITE Research Institute, Toronto Rehabilitation Institute - University Health Network, Canada   

José Zariffa is the KITE Chair in Spinal Cord Injury Research, a Senior Scientist, and the Associate Director, Scientific at the KITE Research Institute, Toronto Rehabilitation Institute - University Health Network. He is also an Associate Professor at the Institute of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Toronto.
Dr. Zariffa received the Ph.D. degree from the University of Toronto’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering. He later completed post-doctoral fellowships at the International Collaboration On Repair Discoveries (ICORD) in Vancouver, Canada, and at the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute – University Health Network in Toronto, Canada. 
His research interests focus on neuroprosthetics and technology for upper limb neurorehabilitation, encompassing work in wearable sensors, neural interfaces, electrophysiology, and machine learning. He was the recipient of an Ontario Early Researcher Award. In 2021, his team was awarded the Grand Prize in the Spinal Cord Rehab Innovation Challenge, a national competition focused on new tools to measure rehab activities and their impact. 

Andrea Bandini, PhD, Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Pisa, Italy

Andrea Bandini is an Assistant Professor at the Interdisciplinary Research Center "Health Science" at Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna (Pisa, Italy). Additionally, he is an Adjunct Scientist at KITE - Toronto Rehabilitation Institute - University Health Network (Canada), where he previously held a post-doctoral position until 2021. At KITE, he collaborates with the Steele Swallowing Lab. 
Dr. Bandini earned his PhD in Bioengineering from the University of Bologna (Italy) in 2016. Before this, he achieved a master’s degree in biomedical engineering (2012) and a bachelor’s degree in electronic engineering (2010) from the University of Florence (Italy).
His primary research objective is to improve access to healthcare and optimize interventions for individuals with neurological disorders. Driven by this goal, he develops multi-modal and intelligent tools for remote clinical assessment. His research is at the intersection of artificial intelligence, computer vision, biomedical signal processing, and rehabilitation engineering, focusing on neurological disorders and aging. Dr. Bandini's research interests encompass the development of signal and image processing algorithms, specifically targeting assessments related to speech, swallowing, and upper limb functions. 

James Cotton, PhD, Regenstein Foundation Center for Bionic Medicine, United States

I am an electrical engineer, neuroscientist, and physiatrist working as a physician-scientist at Shirley Ryan AbilityLab and Assistant Professor in the Northwestern University Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation. My lab works at the intersection of artificial intelligence, wearable sensors, computer vision, causal and biomechanical modeling, and novel technologies to more precisely monitor and improve rehabilitation outcomes. In particular, we focus on methods that can be easily translated and disseminated at scale into the clinic or real world. 

Behnaz Ghoraani, PhD, Florida Atlantic University, United States 

Dr. Behnaz Ghoraani is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and serves as the Center for SMART Health Co-Director at Florida Atlantic University (FAU). Before joining FAU, she was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Rochester Institute of Technology from 2012 to 2016. Dr. Ghoraani has been a member of the Board of Scientific Counselors for the National Library of Medicine (NLM) since 2023. Dr. Ghoraani holds positions as Associate Editor for both the IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics and BioMedical Engineering OnLine and frequently serves as a guest editor for various journals. In addition to her editorial roles, Dr. Ghoraani is deeply involved in professional societies. She has chaired the Women in Signal Processing Committee and the Young Professional Committee of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. She has held significant roles in organizing technical programs for major conferences, including IEEE EMBC, IEEE ICASSP, and IEEE COINS. Throughout her career, Dr. Ghoraani has received numerous accolades, including the Scholar of the Year Award in 2020, the Service and Outreach Award in 2022, the Distinguished Researcher of the Research Park at FAU in 2022, and most recently, the Engineering Educator of the Year from The Engineers' Council in 2024.
Dr. Ghoraani has received the prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award in 2020. Her research has been supported by federal and state grants from the NIH, NSF, and the Florida Department of Health. Her research primarily focuses on generating clinically relevant engineering solutions to tackle significant bottlenecks in data analytics, with an emphasis on computer-aided clinical decision-making, long-term and continuous health monitoring, remote and personalized therapeutic management, non-stationary and multidimensional signal analysis, adaptive signal feature extraction, and both traditional and deep learning machine learning techniques. 

Rogério Pirraco, PhD, University of Minho, Portugal

Rogério Pirraco is a senior researcher at the 3B’s Research Group of the University of Minho. His research goals are deeply related with solving one of the most pressing challenges in Tissue Engineering: the vascularization issue. He has been exploring the use of alternative cell sources for this purpose, namely the stromal vascular fraction of adipose tissue. He is also very much interested in developing ECM-derived matrices that offer optimal support for vascularization strategies. Rogério’s work is supported by a Starting Grant from the European Research Council. He has published more than 75 works in international refereed journals, books and conference proceedings.

This Collection welcomes submission of original research articles. Should you wish to submit a different article type, please read the submission guidelines (BioMedical Engineering OnLine, Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation) to confirm that type is accepted by the journal you are submitting to. 

Articles for this Collection should be submitted via our submission system, Snapp (BioMedical Engineering OnLine, Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation). Please, select the appropriate Collection title “Engineering Innovations for Precision Medicine" under the “Details” tab during the submission stage.

Articles will undergo the standard peer-review process of the journal they are considered in BioMedical Engineering OnLine, Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation and are subject to all of the journal’s standard policies. Articles will be added to the Collection as they are published.

The Editors have no competing interests with the submissions which they handle through the peer-review process. The peer-review of any submissions for which the Editors have competing interests is handled by another Editorial Board Member who has no competing interests.