Dr. Michael Unser is a distinguished leader in biomedical imaging and signal processing with profound contributions to medical image analysis methodology. He currently serves as a Full Professor at EPFL's School of Engineering and holds the position of academic director for EPFL's Center for Imaging in Lausanne, Switzerland. Born in Zug, Switzerland on April 9, 1958, he earned both his M.S. (summa cum laude) and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from EPFL in 1981 and 1984, respectively. Prior to joining EPFL as a professor, he spent twelve years conducting research at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, USA, where he established himself as an innovator in bioimaging techniques and methodologies.
Professor Unser is internationally recognized for his pioneering development of mathematical frameworks for biomedical image processing, particularly his transformative work on wavelets and splines that has revolutionized medical imaging analysis. His research group was among the first to promote wavelets as mathematical tools in biology and medicine, pioneering their application in fMRI and PET imaging data analysis. His highly influential 1999 paper Splines A perfect fit for signal and image processing has garnered over 2,300 citations, while his 2000 paper Sampling 50 years after Shannon is considered a landmark contribution to the field. As of 2020, his extensive publication record of over 400 journal papers has accumulated more than 50,000 citations with an impressive H-index of 102, solidifying his position among the world's most highly cited researchers in engineering.
Beyond his groundbreaking research, Professor Unser has provided significant leadership to the scientific community through his roles as founding chair of the IEEE Signal Processing Society's Bio Imaging and Signal Processing technical committee and as associate Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging. He has received numerous prestigious honors including three European Research Council Advanced Grants (2010, 2015, 2021), the IEEE Engineering in Biology and Medicine Society Academic Career Achievement Award (2020), and recognition as an IEEE Fellow. His book An introduction to sparse stochastic processes has become a standard reference in the field, and he continues to advance biomedical imaging through his ERC-funded research on signal processing, bioimaging, and functional learning. Professor Unser's ongoing work promises to further bridge theoretical mathematics with practical medical applications, ensuring his lasting impact on the future of computational bioimaging and healthcare technology.
