Nominees for the Board of Directors

Nominee for ISOCS President:

Prof. Dr. Giorgio Sberveglieri, Current ISOCS Vice-president

Department of Information Engineering, University of Brescia, Italy.

My research activity is focused on applied physics and the development of functional materials and their applications. I started in the 70s working in the field of thin film solar cells (1971-1987). I after moved to the field of gas sensors focusing first on the development of thin film techniques and then on nanowire technology to develop functional metal oxide layers. My activity addressed both the study of the synthesis techniques to control and optimize the material structure at the micro and nanoscale to optimize its receptor and transductor function and the exploitation of these devices and electronic nose systems in different applicative fields including environmental monitoring, medicine, food quality, safety and security. Working in the field of gas sensors, in 1988 I founded the SENSOR laboratory (http://sensor.ing.unibs.it/). Originally composed by myself and a technician, it’s now a well established lab in the field of gas sensors and solar cells (see next) where about 20 people work, including personnel from both the University of Brescia and the National Council for Research (CNR). In the period 2001-2003 I was the coordinator of the industrialapplicative network of the National Institute for the Physics of Matter (INFM), contributing to start about 23 spin-off companies in Italy. Recently, the activity on functional materials at SENSOR lab has been dedicated to explore applications other than gas sensors, including biosensors and solar cells, leading to several publications on high impact papers, including cover papers, and funded projects.

I published about 428 papers, getting over 7700 citations and an h-index of 44

Nominee for ISOCS Vice-president:

Prof. Krishna C. Persaud, Founding member of ISOCS and Former Treasurer

School of Chemical Engineering and Analytical Science, University of Manchester, United Kingdom

Research interests in the area of olfaction from physiology to chemistry. Has been involved in the development of gas sensor arrays for sensing odours based on conducting polymers, that became commercialised by Aromascan plc, now Osmetech plc. He has had a wide number of external activities such as Exchange Coordinator for the GOSPEL Network of Excellence, Committee member of the NOSE II forum and Executive secretary and treasurer of the European Chemoreception Organisation (ECRO), Treasurer of the International Society for Olfaction and Chemical Sensing (ISOCS). He has been an associate editor for a number of journals that include Materials Science and Engineering C, Biochemical Journal, IEEE Sensors Journal, Sensors and Actuators B.

He has received a number of awards that include the Prince of Wales Award for Technological Innovation Certificate 1995, European Space Agency Certificate of Achievement in 1997, Silver Medal Royal Academy of Engineering, 1999, Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry 2002, Fellow of the Institute of Measurement and Control 2006.

Founder of Multisensor Systems Ltd (www.multisensor.co.uk)

Nominee for Treasurer:

Prof. Dr. Julian W. Gardner, Former ISOCS President and current Treasurer

School of Engineering, University of Warwick, United Kingdom

Julian Gardner BSc PhD DSc FIET FREng is the Professor of Electronic Engineering at the University of Warwick, UK. He has published over 450 technical papers and is an author of 8 books. He was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship in Germany in 1994 and Fellow of the Institute of Technology in 1997. In addition to being professor of electronic engineering, he is Founder and Head of the Microsensors & Bioelectronics Laboratory; and co-director of the Centre for Cognitive & Neural Systems at Warwick. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2006 and won the IET JJ Thompson Medal for Achievements in Electronics in 2007. He has been involved in the spin-out of three companies, with the latest “Cambridge CMOS Sensors Ltd” in August 2008 that was highly commended last year as “Start-up of the Year” at the British Engineering Awards. His research interests are Microsensors & MEMS in general, and in particular Artificial Olfaction, Chemical Sensing, Smart Sensors, and Signal Processing Methods

Nominee for Secretary:

Dr. Jan Mitrovics, Current ISOCS Secretary

CEO, JLM Innovation GmbH, Germany

Jan Mitrovics is CEO of JLM Innovation GmbH, a company providing hardware and software for R&D on chemical sensors. He has been active in the field of chemical sensors, electronic noses and pattern recognition since 20 years and has extensive know-how in the design of sensor systems, interfaces embedded systems and software for pattern recognition and data acquisition.Jan Mitrovics co-founded a spin-off company to commercialize electronic nose technology in 1997. In 2004 he started JLM Innovation where he develops sensor systems, sensor networks and data analysis tools. Jan has been involved in the development of many different sensor array platforms that are used in a broad range of industrial, consumer, safety and research applications.

Nominees for European Representative:

Prof. Dr. Achim Lilienthal

Centre for Applied Autonomous Sensor Systems, University of Orebro, Sweden

I am associate professor at Örebro University and head of the Mobile Robotics and Olfaction Lab, which is a research group at the AASS Research Centre and was formerly called the “Learning Systems Lab”. By design, the research directions of the MRO Lab are aligned with my personal research interests. The general focus is on perception systems for mobile robots that operate in unconstrained, dynamic environments. A major aim is to integrate research results timely in industrial demonstrators. More specifically, my research addresses Rich 3D Perception, Robot Vision and Mobile Robot Olfaction. I am author/co-author of over 90 refereed conference papers and journal publications.

Dr. Patrick Mielle

Senior Researcher, Food And Behaviour Research Center, CNRS –Dijon, France

Patrick Mielle received was graduated in microelectronics from Université de Bourgogne, France, with an emphasis in hardware developments.

He was working for seven years at the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) as an electronics specialist for safety. Then he turned in 1980 to a more ecological work and joined the newly created Flavour Research Laboratory (currently Centre des Sciences du Goût et de l’Alimentation / Food and Behavior Research Center) at the French National Institute for Agronomical Research (INRA).

He developed in 1982 the first Flash Injection Purging and Trapping System and has designed in 1985 one of the first PC based High Resolution Data Acquisition System use in Gas Chromatography.

He has been developing instrumentation systems (mainly GC, GC/Sniff and gas sensors) for instrumental analysis of aroma and flavours. He has been working since 1993 on semiconducting gas sensors, and their use in food quality control. Main objective was to develop a system for fast and on-line analysis of food products.

He has over 32 years of multidiscipline electronics and chemical R&D experience, including chemical sensors, flavour analysis, sampling and extraction techniques, chromatography et spectrometry. His current focus is the development of an Artificial Mouth, able to mimic the human chewing process to follow on-line the flavour release (aroma and taste).

Organizer and responsible for training course, international workshops and technological meetings dealing with «Electronic Olfaction». He gives lectures in national college of engineering and was teaching in 11 European Schools all over Europe. Consultant in Europe and the United States for global companies developing chemical sensors applications. Member of the Steering Committee of the newly created ‘International Society for Olfaction and Chemical Sensing’.

He is a reviewer for 18 international scientific journals and conferences.

He is involved for 7 years in the development of an “Artificial Mouth” for a deeper understanding of the flavor release from foodstuff during the eating process. The instrument was presented live in Palais de la découverte, Paris, from Dec. 2006 to Feb. 2007, and is currently available fro experiments.

Nominee for Asian Representative:

Dr. Hiroshi Ishida

Department of Mechanical Systems Engineering, Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, Japan

Hiroshi Ishida is Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Systems Engineering, Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, Japan.
The focus of his research group is to develop robots that can find sources of airborne gas plumes or underwater chemical plumes. To this end, they developed the Active Stereo Nose a differential gas sampling system inspired by the dog’s nose, and the Crayfish robt that mimics the mechanism used by crayfish in nature to create unidirectional water currents.

Nominee for American Representative:

Prof. Dr. Ricardo Gutierrez-Osuna

Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, USA

Ricardo Gutierrez-Osuna received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the Polytechnic University of Madrid (Spain) in 1992, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Engineering from North Carolina State University in 1995 and 1998, respectively.  He is a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University.  Dr. Gutierrez-Osuna is a recipient of the NSF Career Award for his research on machine olfaction.  He currently serves as an associate editor for the IEEE Sensors Journal, served as program committee chair for ISOEN 2011, and organized a workshop on active chemical sensing at the 2010 IEEE Sensors Conference. He has broad research interests in sensing and perception, from hardware implementation to computational modeling.