At the invitation of Prof. LIN Fujiang, Prof. Mohamad Sawan from Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal paid a visit to USTC and gave a talk entitled “Will Emerging Brain-Machine Interfaces Achieve Expected Diagnostic and Treatment of Neural Diseases?” on July 12. Vice Dean of School of Information Science and Technology, Prof. LIU Falin hosted the talk and later launched a discussion with Prof. Sawan on intentions of academic exchange and cooperation.

The combination of Biomedical Engineering and micro-nano chip technology, which is a newly developed interdiscipline, is at present one of the hottest frontier research fields all over the world. As a pioneer in this field, Prof. Sawan introduced in the talk some crucial functions of the newly developed implantable brain-computer interface on diagnosis and nerve recovery. He first introduced some diseases of the brain and neural system, and then gave some specific cases to illustrated the way how to diagnose and treat the diseases using knowledge of sensors, integrated circuits, and signal processing. Finally, in the Q&A session, Prof. Sawan answered every question that the audiences raised with patience. The talk, which ended in a harmonious atmosphere, widened the students’ view, and brought them more in-depth understandings on this application area of IC technology.

Prof. Mohamad Sawan received his PhD Degree in Electrical Engineering at Universite de Sherbrooke, Canada in 1990. He then works at Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal since 1991 and is currently a professor on Microelectronics and Biomedical Engineering. Prof. Sawan is a Fellow of IEEE and a Fellow of Canada Academy of Engineering. His research interests mainly include design and test of analog/mixed signal circuits and systems, and signal processing/modeling/integration. Prof. Sawan has published over 600 papers and owns 12 authorized patents. He is now the associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems-II, IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, and IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Circuits and Systems.