Accelerating Science Together: Expanding Sensor Technology Frontiers

Fabio Cicoira is a professor of Chemical Engineering at Polytechnique Montreal. He received his MSc in Chemistry from the Università di Bologna (Italy), after a research internship at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN), and his PhD in Materials Science and Engineering from EPFL (Switzerland). He worked as a researcher at the National Research Council of Italy and as postdoctoral fellow at INRS-EMT. He was a visiting scientist at Cornell University from 2007 to 2009, as a recipient of the prestigious Marie Curie International Outgoing Fellowship of the European Union. He is known for his studies of organic bioelectronics, self-healing materials, flexible, stretchable and wearable electronics. He has published about 100 articles in international peer-reviewed scientific journals and several book chapters. He has been invited over 40 times to talk at international conferences and he has given over 30 seminars in universities and national laboratories. He is a member of the editorial board of the journal Flexible and Printed Electronics (IOP Publishing). He organized the first European Workshop in Organic Bioelectronics in 2010 (funded by the European Science Foundation) and organized several symposia at the MRS spring meetings and IEEE conferences. Recruited as a junior faculty by EPM in October 2011, Prof. Cicoira (also affiliated to the Institute of Biomedical Engineering) has been impressively active in hiring world- class graduate and undergraduate students and establishing new collaborations with other faculties, on- and off-campus. He is presently leading a group of 12 PhD students, 3 MSc students, 2 PDFs, and several undergraduate students. His research is mainly funded by the National Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), the Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI), the Fonds de Recherche Québec Nature et Technologie, the Québec Ministère de l'Économie, de l'Innovation et des Exportations. Prof. Cicoira has been appointed Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2021.

Hudson Miranda is a cofounder and the current CEO of FabNS, a hard-tech spin-off from the Federal University of Minas Gerais. Hudson has a bachelor's degree from UFMG in Control and Automation Engineering in 2016 and a PhD in Electrical Engineering in 2020, where he focused in the development of scientific instruments for optical characterization of materials. He is the coinventor of 5 patents and 6 software registries related to technology that FabNS now offers commercially, among other relevant intellectual properties. Through nearly 10 years of R&D experience Hudson has worked with optical systems for confocal microscopy, control systems for scanning probe microscopy and artificial intelligence for advanced materials characterization data analysis. Currently, as the CEO for FabNS, Hudson coordinates a team of more than 18 highly specialized collaborators including 6 PhDs and 3 PhD candidates. The technologies FabNS developed in partnership with Brazilian research centers now aid researchers in developing and incorporating novel nanomaterials in a wide range of applications.