Michael Unser

Michael Unser is Professor and Director of EPFL's Biomedical Imaging Group. His main research area is biomedical image processing. He has a strong interest in sampling theories, multiresolution algorithms, wavelets, and the use of splines for image processing. He is the author of over 150 published journal papers in these areas, and is one of ISI’s Highly Cited authors in Engineering.

He was born in Zug, Switzerland, on April 9, 1958. He received the M.S. (summa cum laude) and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering in 1981 and 1984, respectively, from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne, Switzerland. From 1985 to 1997, he was with the Biomedical Engineering and Instrumentation Program, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda USA, conducting research on bioimaging and heading the Image Processing Group.

Michael Unser received the Dommer prize for excellence in 1981 (1st rank among all EPFL graduates) and the research prize of the Brown-Boveri Corporation (Switzerland) for his Ph.D. thesis in 1984. He is recipient of the IEEE Signal Processing Society's 1995 Best Paper Award (with A. Aldroubi and M. Eden), the IEEE Signal Processing Society's 2000 Magazine Award, and the IEEE Signal Processing Society's 2003 Best Paper Award (with T. Blu).

He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Wavelet Digest, the electronic newsletter of the wavelet community. He has held the position of associate Editor-in-Chief (2003-2005) for the IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging. He is (or was) member of the editorial boards of Foundations and Trends in Signal Processing, the SIAM Journal of Imaging Sciences, the Journal of Mathematical Imaging and Vision, Sampling Theory in Signal and Image Processing, Signal Processing (1997-2000), Pattern Recognition (2000-2006), the Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation (1997-2006), and the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine (2003-2006). He also served as Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging (1999-2002; 2006-present) including Guest Editor for its special issue on Wavelets in Medical Imaging, the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (1992-1995), and the IEEE Signal Processing Letters (1994-1998).

Dr. Unser co-organized the 1994 IEEE-EMBS Workshop on Wavelets in Medicine and Biology, and served as regular chair for SPIE's annual conference on Wavelets from 1993 to 2003. He was general co-chair (with Z.P. Liang) for the first IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI'2002), which was held in Washington, DC, July 7-10, 2002. He is a long standing member of the Image and Multidimensional Signal Processing Committee (1993-2000; 2003-present) of the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS). He was chairman of the IEEE-SPS technical committee on Bio Imaging and Signal Processing (BISP) (2004-2006), as well as the ISBI steering committee (2006-2008).

He was plenary speaker at the IEEE Intl. Conf. on Image Processing (ICIP'05), the IEEE Medical Imaging Conference (MIC'04), SPIE's conference on Medical Imaging (MedIm 2002), as well as a number of other conferences and workshops.

Prof. Unser is a Fellow of the IEEE (1999), an elected member of the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences (2007), and an EURASIP Fellow (2009). He is the recipient of the 2008 Technical Achievement Award of the IEEE Signal Processing Society "for the contributions to the theory and practice of splines and their applications in signal and image processing."