Special Sessions

The Women in Engineering special session will include two complementary activities:

Networking Lunch

An informal networking lunch bringing together participants and invited researchers and professionals from different career stages and backgrounds.

Participants will be invited to join themed tables, each providing an opportunity to exchange experiences, discuss challenges, and share perspectives in a smaller and more personal setting.

• Career Pathways: Bige Deniz Unluturk and Yalda Shahriari
• Balancing Work and Life: Inês Domingues
• Engineering Skills and Practice: Beren Semiz and Gayathri Manikutty
• Identity and Belonging: Delaram Yazdansepas
• Across Career Stages: Laura Brattain
• Open Conversation: Afsaneh Doryab

Interactive Panel

The second part of the session will be an interactive panel discussion focused on audience participation and on the different experiences of women working across biomedical engineering.

The discussion will explore career development, research and professional experiences, opportunities and challenges, work-life balance, leadership, and the different paths through which careers in engineering can evolve.

Participants will be able to contribute questions and highlight the topics they consider most relevant, helping to shape the discussion throughout the session.

Moderator: Inês Domingues

Panelists:

• Beren Semiz – Assistant Professor at Koç University, Turkey, working on biomedical signal processing and wearable technologies.
• Gayathri Manikutty – Assistant Professor and research lead at AMMACHI Labs, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, India, working on haptics and social robotics.
• Bige Deniz Unluturk – Assistant Professor at Michigan State University, USA, working on molecular communication.

The Young Professionals special session will follow a similar interactive format, with a particular focus on the questions, choices, and opportunities that shape the early stages of a career in biomedical engineering.

Networking Lunch

The networking lunch will provide an informal environment for students, early-career researchers, and young professionals to exchange experiences with invited researchers and professionals.

The discussion will focus on topics particularly relevant to the beginning and development of a professional career, including:

• Choosing between academic, research, and industry career paths
• Transitions between academia and industry
• International mobility and career opportunities
• Building technical and transferable skills
• Developing professional networks and collaborations
• Managing uncertainty and making career decisions

Career Trajectories Panel

The interactive panel will bring together professionals with different career trajectories and backgrounds to discuss how careers in biomedical engineering can develop across academia, research, and industry.

Panelists will share their experiences, discuss important career decisions and transitions, and reflect on the skills and opportunities that have shaped their professional paths.

Moderator: Brandon Oubre

Panelists:

• Hugo Plácido da Silva – Senior Researcher at Instituto de Telecomunicações and Invited Professor at Instituto Superior Técnico, Portugal, working on biosignals and wearable sensing.
• Jasper Gielen – Postdoctoral Researcher at M3-BIORES, KU Leuven, Belgium, working on cardiorespiratory time series acquired from wearable technologies.
• Laura Brattain – Associate Professor at the University of Central Florida, USA, working on biomedical AI and ultrasound, following a research career that also included MIT Lincoln Laboratory.

From Sensors to Scale: Turning Intelligent Sensing into Real-World Impact

This conversational panel will bring together perspectives from industry, entrepreneurship, and applied research to discuss what happens after a promising sensing technology leaves the laboratory.

The discussion will focus on three main topics:

• The value of hardware in an increasingly AI- and software-dominated world, including areas such as edge AI
• The transition from a strong technology to a scalable product and company
• The different pathways for taking academic technology into industry and ultimately to real users

The session will be conducted as an open discussion rather than a sequence of formal presentations, encouraging interaction between the panelists and the audience.

Moderator: João Paulo Cunha

Panelists:

• Amir Rahmani – Centraline
• Vaidyanathan Ramasarma – TDK Corporation
• PLUX
• CardioID

Scientific Publishing in the Age of AI: How Should Conferences and Journals Adapt?

Scientific communication is entering a period of rapid transformation. Artificial intelligence is accelerating the production, analysis, and communication of scientific content, while conferences and journals are simultaneously facing increasing numbers of submissions, growing demands on reviewers and editors, and expectations for faster publication and dissemination.

This panel will discuss how conferences, journals, editors, reviewers, and scientific communities can adapt to this changing environment while preserving scientific quality, integrity, and trust.

The discussion will address questions such as:

• How generative AI is changing scientific writing, reviewing, and editorial workflows
• How conferences and journals can respond to increasing submission volumes and growing pressure on the peer-review system
• How to balance faster scientific communication with rigorous review and quality control
• What forms of transparency should be expected when AI tools are used by authors, reviewers, or editors
• Whether current models of peer review remain sustainable as the volume and speed of scientific production continue to increase
• How conferences and journals may need to evolve to remain effective, trustworthy, and relevant

The session will bring together editorial and research perspectives in an open discussion, with audience participation encouraged throughout.