Miguel A. González Ballester
Prof. Miguel A. González Ballester holds a computer science degree from Universitat Jaume I, Spain (1996) and a doctoral degree from the University of Oxford, UK (2000). His doctorate, under supervision of Prof. Sir Michael Brady and Prof. Andrew Zisserman, focused on the development of algorithms for the analysis of brain MRI data for multiple sclerosis and schizophrenia.
He was awarded the prestigious Toshiba Research Fellowship and moved to Japan to work for two years as a senior researcher at Toshiba Medical Systems, where he developed novel, patented systems for MRI parallel imaging. In late 2001 he obtained a faculty position at INRIA (Sophia Antipolis, France), where he led research projects on medical image analysis and mathematical modelling. In 2004 he joined the University of Bern (Switzerland), as head of the medical image analysis group, and later became head of the surgical technology division at the Faculty of Medicine. There, he supervised a division composed of 4 research groups working on medical image analysis, computer-assisted surgery (mainly for orthopaedics and CMF surgery), and surgical robotics. From 2008 until September 2013 he was in charge of the Research Department of the company Alma IT Systems in Barcelona (Spain), where he led the development of a new generation of computer tools for diagnosis and surgical planning.
In October 2013 he was awarded an ICREA Research Professorship, and joined the Department of Engineering at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, where he founded the Barcelona Center for New Medical Technologies (BCN Medtech). He has 150 publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals and 350 conference publications, and has supervised to completion 27 PhD theses. He has led numerous research projects, including the FP7 project HEAR-EU (of which he was the coordinator) and the ERC Synergy project Zee-Zoom-Zap. He is a regular contributor to scientific committees and journal review boards (IEEE TMI, IEEE TBME, Front. Radiol., etc.), and member of the programme committee of numerous conferences (MICCAI, CARS, ISBI...). He is also co-founder and scientific advisor of the company MiWEndo Solutions S.L., and a Visiting Scientist at the QUANTIC research group of Barcelona Supercomputing Center, where he focuses his research on quantum machine learning.
