Keynote and Invited Lectures

Keynote Talk
Presidential Talk
Invited Lectures

Keynote Talk

Judit Gervain

Judit Gervain is a Full Professor of Developmental Psychology, University of Padua, Italy and a Senior Research Scientist, CNRS, France. Her research focuses early speech perception and language acquisition in typically and atypically developing infants. Her work is published in leading journals, such as Science Advances, Nature Communications, PNAS, Current Biology. She is an associate editor at Developmental Science, Cognition, Annual Reviews of Developmental Psychology and Neurophotonics. Since 2024, she has been serving as the President elect of the International Society for Near-Infrared Spectroscopy.

Presidential Talk

Turgut Durduran

Turgut Durduran is an ICREA professor at ICFO-The Institute of Photonic Sciences in Barcelona, Spain. He leads the “Medical Optics Group” which focuses on the development , validation and clinical translation of near-infrared diffuse optical technologies for a variety of applications. The group collaborates locally and internationally with clinicians, industries and other academic partners and has led several large European consortia.

Invited Lectures

Simone Shamay-Tsoory

Simone Shamay-Tsoory is a Full Professor of Psychology and Head of the Haifa Brain and Behavior Hub at the University of Haifa. Her research investigates how the brain represents emotions and social behavior, with a particular focus on empathy, social alignment, and inter-brain synchrony. Using hyperscanning fNIRS and fine-grained analyses of dyadic behavior, her lab studies a wide range of social processes in both typically developing individuals and populations with social or neurodevelopmental conditions. She is especially interested in advancing brain and behavior technologies that enable the measurement of real-life social interaction.
Prof. Shamay-Tsoory is internationally recognized for her pioneering work on the neural mechanisms of human empathy, which has helped define the neurobiological foundations of social cognition. Her recent projects extend this framework by examining inter-brain plasticity – how social interaction reshapes neural networks across individuals.
She has served as Vice Dean for Research of the Faculty of Social Sciences and as Head of the Integrated Center for Brain and Behavior. Prof. Shamay-Tsoory serves on the editorial boards of Biological Psychiatry, Frontiers in Neuroscience, Social Neuroscience, and Cultural Neuroscience. Her research has been supported by major grants, including an ERC Advanced Grant, and she has mentored over forty graduate and postdoctoral researchers, many of whom now lead independent academic labs worldwide.

Yasuyo Minagawa

Yasuyo Minagawa is a Professor in the Department of Psychology, Faculty of Letters, Keio University, Japan. She received her Ph.D. in Medicine from the University of Tokyo. After completing her doctorate, she began using a prototype Hitachi fNIRS system for infant studies. Building on her expertise in fNIRS, she has participated in various research projects on the cerebral basis of communication as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique (LSCP), ENS-CNRS, Paris; University College London; and the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics, Tokyo. She currently directs the Keio Baby Laboratory, where behavioral and neurocognitive studies of infants and children are conducted. Her research focuses on language acquisition, social cognition, and their relation to parent–child interaction. She investigates these topics through longitudinal assessments of neurodiverse cohorts, including preterm infants and infants with an elevated likelihood of neurodevelopmental disorders.

Yina Ma

Dr. Yina Ma is currently the director of Social & Affective NeuroPharmacology Lab and Principle Investigator in IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Beijing Normal University. Integrating neuroscience techniques and computational modeling, her research group aims to elucidate the neurobiological mechanisms underlying social decision-making during interpersonal and intergroup interactions and to reveal how the mechanisms are altered. These findings have been published on high-profile journals such as Nat Neurosci, Nat Hum Behav, Neuron, Nat Communication, PNAS, PLOS Biol, Mol Psychiatry, Brain, Trends Cogn Sci, etc. The long-term goals of the SANP Lab are to uncover the central neurobiological determinants of human social behaviors, and to integrate its empirical findings with public mental health issues to promote social functioning.

Alexander von Lühmann

Alexander von Lühmann is currently head of the Intelligent Biomedical Sensing Lab at TU Berlin’s Machine Learning department and BIFOLD, the Berlin institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data. He is also a visiting researcher at the Neurophotonics Center of Boston University (BU NPC) and the Lead Technology Advisor at NIRx Medical Technologies. Before this, he was the Chief Science Officer and R&D Director at NIRx for 2,5 years, post-doc and visiting researcher at BU NPC and Harvard Medical School, and Chief Technology Officer at Crely, a healthcare startup based in the US and Singapore. Dr von Lühmann is on the board of directors of the Society for functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (SfNIRS), co-chair of the SfNIRS standardization committee, and a member of the ISO/DIN working group for the international fNIRS standard. He received his PhD (Dr.-Ing.) in Neurotechnology and Machine Learning with distinction in 2018 from TU Berlin, and his M.Sc. and B.Sc. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in 2014/11. His research focuses on multimodal fNIRS and diffuse optical tomography instruments and signal analysis using machine learning. With special interest in everyday-neuroscience, his goal is to advance wearable data-driven imaging technologies for continuous brain-body imaging of health and disease.

Stefan Carp

Dr. Stefan Carp is an Associate Professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical and a co-director of the Optics@Martinos group at Massachusetts General Hospital. His PhD background was in light transport models and optoacoustic imaging. He joined Massachusetts General Hospital in 2005 as a research fellow (initially working with Dr. David Boas) and he has been active there ever since, with his work centering on the development and clinical translation of non-invasive monitoring technologies using near-infrared light. In the past decade, his group has focused on advancing optical blood flow monitoring using diffuse correlation spectroscopy (DCS) and related technologies. In particular, together with colleagues at the Martinos Optics group he pioneered the use of long-wavelength (1064 nm) light for DCS and has demonstrated the implementation of compact, high SNR and high channel count interferometric DCS instrumentation for functional brain imaging.

Wesley Baker

Wesley Baker is an Assistant Professor of Neurology at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. His overarching research goal is the development and validation of diffuse optical techniques that can be used for precision medicine to reduce brain injury in vulnerable pediatric populations. He also studies the interplay between the delivery of pediatric critical care and neurophysiology. A major focus of his current research is the development of a non-invasive optical approach for measuring intracranial pressure, which he has translated to pediatric hydrocephalus and congenital heart disease. He is also interested in formulating new analytical models and paradigms to improve the fidelity of cerebral hemodynamic data based on optical signals.

Felix Scholkmann

Felix Scholkmann received his PhD from the University of Zurich, Switzerland, in 2014. He is a lecturer at the University of Zurich, a research group leader at the Biomedical Optics Research Laboratory of the University Hospital Zurich/University of Zurich, and a research associate at the University of Bern. His research is primarily focused on neurophotonics, with a particular
emphasis on functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) and NIRS-based cerebral oximetry. He also conducts research in the fields of biomedical signal processing, neuroscience, biophysics and physiology.

Special Session

Open fNIRS: Standards, Tools, and Culture for the Next Decade

Meryem Ayşe Yücel

Dr. Meryem Ayşe Yücel is a Research Associate Professor in Biomedical Engineering and Technical Director of the Neurophotonics Center at Boston University. She is widely recognized for her contributions to functional near-infrared spectroscopy, particularly in advancing signal processing methods, analytical rigor, and best practices that strengthen methodological standards and inclusivity in neuroimaging. Her work bridges foundational methodological advances with cognitive, clinical, and real-world neuroscience applications. She serves on the Board of the Society for Functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy and chairs its Standardization and Open Science Committee, supporting community-driven efforts to advance rigor, transparency, and accessibility in the field.

Xi-Nian Zuo

Xi-Nian Zuo is a Fellow of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping (OHBM) and currently serves as an associate editor for Network Neuroscience, Scientific Data, and Science Bulletin. He proposed Developmental Population Neuroscience and has focused on its cross-disciplinary discovery. Dr. Zuo has led multiple large-scale data-sharing projects, including the Consortium for Reliability and Reproducibility (CoRR), Chinese Brain Health Imaging Consortium (CHART), and Chinese Color Nest Project (CCNP). He has been responsible for building the Interdisciplinary Brain Database for In-vivo Population Imaging (ID-BRAIN) at the National Basic Science Data Center, as well as the Chinese Color Nest Data Community (CCNDC) at China Scientific Data Bank, as a Chief Scientist. He has taken a leadership role in the National Program of Directional Prediction and Roadmap for Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, joined international efforts to chart human brain development across the lifespan, and promoted the reliability and validity of functional representations of human brain connectomes.

Jiaming Cao

Dr. Jiaming Cao is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Cognitive and Brain Sciences, University of Macau, Macau SAR, China. He received his MSc and PhD degrees in Biomedical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, United States. His research is mainly concerned with developing computational methods for fNIRS and DOT, towards applications including high-accuracy reconstruction, algorithm acceleration, and photon modeling.

Javier Andreu-Pérez

Javier Andreu-Perez (SMIEEE, SFHEA, EPSRC Associate College Member) received the PhD degree in 2012 at Lancaster University and completed postdoctoral research at Imperial College London. He is currently a Reader (Associate Professor, tenured) in Human-Centred Artificial Intelligence at the School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering (CSEE) and group chair of the Smart Health Technologies Group at the University of Essex (UK). His expertise focuses on human-centred artificial intelligence, which comprises novel methodologies for humanising Artificial Intelligence and making it more suitable for working with/alongside human systems. Javier’s other interests include sensor engineering, bio/neuroengineering, and life sciences research. Javier has published in journals published by Elsevier, Springer Nature, IEEE (TFS, TSMC, TBMI, JBHI, TDCS, etc.), and other venues in artificial intelligence and cognitive neuroscience. Javier’s work in artificial intelligence and biomedical engineering has attracted 6400+ citations. Javier was chair of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS) task force on Extensions of Type-1 fuzzy sets (2018-2022). Javier acts as the Editor-in-Chief (EiC) and associate EiC of the journals of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing (Springer-Nature Q1) and Neurocomputing (Elsevier, Q1), respectively. He’s been invited as an expert reviewer by major publishers such as Science, The Lancet, and BMC. He has served on the technical committee for IEEE WCCI on several occasions and as workshop chair for FUZZ-IEEE. UK research councils have funded Javier’s research, and UKRI, the Royal Society, the Wellcome Trust and big IT corporations such as Nvidia, Amazon, and Oracle support other funding schemes. Javier has an extensive portfolio of successful knowledge transfer and industry collaborations. Javier has won personal fellowship awards for his research career from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (2022), Talentia Senior Fellowship from the Andalusia Scientific Council (2020), and the best research associate research presentation at Imperial College London (2017), and EMEA finalist for the Global Eureka Awards (Oracle Corp.). Javier’s other passions are practising sports and catching up with family and friends.

Christophe Grova

Christophe Grova is Professor in the Department of Physics of Concordia University and a research member of Concordia School of Health (PERFORM center) since July 2014, while remaining adjunct Professor affiliated to Biomedical Engineering Dpt and Neurology and Neurosurgery Dpt at McGill Faculty of Medicine. He is also affiliated to the epilepsy group of the Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI), the McConnell Brain Imaging Center of the MNI and a member of Physnum team at Centre de Recherches Mathématiques.

He received his Engineering and Master degrees in biomedical engineering at the University of Technology of Compiègne (France) in 1998, followed by a Ph.D. in SPECT/MRI registration at University of Rennes (France). From 2003 to 2008, his postdoctoral studies at the MNI were focussed on EEG source imaging of epileptic discharges and the correspondence with EEG/fMRI results, while acting as part-time research associate for the set-up of the MEG centre of Université de Montreal (2006-2008). Dr Grova has been assistant Professor at McGill from July 2008 to July 2014.

Since 2008, he is the director of the “Multimodal Functional Imaging Laboratory” (MultiFunkIm) which is now located on both McGill and Concordia campus. His areas of expertise are EEG/MEG source imaging, multimodal data fusion involving EEG/MEG, fMRI and fNIRS, for application in epilepsy and sleep research. C. Grova is the scientific lead of the physiology platform at Concordia School of Health centre promoting neuroimaging in realistic lifestyle environments using wearable technology (EEG, fNIRS). His team is also handling the development and validation of two software packages: Maximum Entropy on the Mean in Brainstorm for EEG/MEG source imaging and NIRSTORM for fNIRS data analysis and 3D reconstructions.