Archives: Committee Members

Dr. Tracy Cui is William Kepler Whiteford Professor of Bioengineering at the University of Pittsburgh.  Dr. Cui is the Director of the Neural Tissue/Electrode Interface and Neural Tissue Engineering Lab.  She is also the Neural Engineering Track Coordinator for the Department of Bioengineering Graduate Committee. Prior to this she was a Research Scientist at Unilever Research US in Edgewater, New Jersey.

Dr. Cui earned her BE in Polymer Materials and Chemical Engineering and her MS in Biophysics at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China.  She went on to earn her PhD in Macromolecular Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan.

In the Dr. Cui’s lab, the primary research focus is on the interactions between neural tissue and smart biomaterials with special focuses on neural electrode-tissue interface, neural tissue engineering, central nervous system drug delivery, and biosensors.  She has led many multidisciplinary federally funded projects, which produced a strong publication record with an h-index of 51 and over 8700 citations (Google Scholar)

For her work, Dr. Cui has won numerous awards, most recently:

• 2017 Fellow of Royal Society of Chemistry in 2017.
• 2016 Fellow of American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering
• 2013 and 2014 Peking University Engineering Globex Fellow
• 2013 Carnegie Science Emerging Female Scientist Award
• 2009, 2011 and 2015 Pitt Innovator Award
• 2008 National Science Foundation Career Award
• 2005 Wallace Coulter Foundation Translational Early Career Award

She serves as a grant agency reviewer for the National Institute of Health, National Science Foundation, National Research Agency of France, Science Foundation of Ireland, European Research Council and the American Institute of Biological Sciences.  Dr. Cui holds 6 granted U.S. patents, and she is a reviewer for many prestigious journals, such as Science, Nature Communication, ACS Nano, Advanced Materials, Advanced Functional Materials, Biomaterials, Acta Biomaterialia, Biosensors and Bioelectronics, Journal of Neural Engineering amongst others.  Dr. Cui is on the editorial board of the Journal of Materials Chemistry B, Journal of Neural Engineering, Current Opinion in Biomedical Engineering and Advanced NanoBiomed Research.

Luca Catarinucci is Associate Professor in Electromagnetic Fields at the Department of Innovation Engineering – Univesity of Salento, Lecce, Italy, where he teaches “Microwaves” and “Electromagnetic Solutions for Hi-Tech”. Besides various activities in the classical areas of Electromagnetics, in 2005 Catarinucci begun a new research tread referred to Radiofrequency Identification Systems (RFID), dealing with reader and tag antenna design, realization of microwave circuits for the integration of UHF RFID Systems with sensor networks, design of automatic platforms for the over-the-air performance evaluation of RFID tags, prototyping of fully passive RFID tags provided with computational and sensing capabilities, study of new antennas for handheld RFID readers, 3D-printing in Electromagnetics and in RFID, flexible tags, and introduction of Doppler-based RFID-inspired backscattering modulation.

Catarinucci authored more than 150 scientific works of which 69 international journals, 4 chapters of books with international diffusion and more than 80 proceedings of international conferences. Moreover, he holds 2 National Patents about RFID technology.

Corne Rentrop (MsC.) works at the Holst Centre in the hybrid printed electronics group as senior research scientist and project-manager for “pilot-line projects” and “stretchable electronics”. In his function Corne is active in project development (Bilateral and Public Funded) and monitoring the scientific progress.

Corne is a Chemical engineer in polymer science and coatings at the Technical University of Eindhoven. He In his current function Corne is involved in the development of a baseline process for stretchable electronics including substrate conditioning and printability. Corne is also active as spokesman for the OE-a workgroup “hybrid printed electronics”.

Wei Gao is an Assistant Professor of Medical Engineering in Division of Engineering and Applied Science at the California Institute of Technology.  Originally from China, he earned his BS in mechanical engineering at Huazhong University of Science & Technology and his master’s in precision instruments from Tsinghua University. His Ph.D. in chemical engineering is from UC San Diego and he completed a postdoctoral fellowship at UC Berkeley. His research interests are focused on the development of the next-generation of wearable health monitors and micro/nanorobots for personalized and precision medicine. He is a recipient of IEEE EMBS Early Career Achievement Award, IEEE Sensor Council Technical Achievement Award, Sensors Young Investigator Award, MIT Technology Review 35 Innovators Under 35 (TR35) and ACS Young Investigator Award (Division of Inorganic Chemistry). He is a World Economic Forum Young Scientist (Class of 2020) and a member of Global Young Academy (Class of 2019). For more information about Gao’s research and publications, visit www.gao.caltech.edu/.

Dr. Pritesh Hiralal, studied Physics at Manchester and completed his Ph.D. in Engineering at the University of Cambridge. He has spent time in business in Spain and set up Casa Hiralal S.L. and Zendal Backup. He has spent time in industry at the Nokia Research Centre working on high power energy storage, and has published 40+ papers and 15+ patents in the field. He has consulted for materials as well as energy storage device companies. He spent time as a Research Associate as well as an adjunct lecturer at the University of Cambridge. For the last 4 years he has co-founded and is the CEO of Zinergy, developing thin, flexible batteries which have gone from lab demonstrator all the way to production, entering the market in 2020.