Series to Highlight Women in Signal Processing: Prof. Gloria Menegaz

Prof. Gloria Menegaz is a professor of bioengineering in the Department of Computer Science, University of Verona, Italy where she leads the Neuroimaging Lab. She serves as an associate editor of IEEE Signal Processing Letters and EURASIP Journal on Image and Video Processing, and she was a guest editor of Journal of Display Technology. She was chair of three editions of the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) Winter School on Brain Connectomics (2016, 2017, and 2019) and SPS Winter School on Imaging Genetics (2019) and a member of the Organizing Committee of the IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (2019 and 2022). She is a Senior Member of IEEE, a member of the SPS Technical Committee on Bio Imaging and Signal Processing, SPS Representative to the Transactions on Medical Imaging Steering Committee (2021-2023) and a member of IEEE Woman in Engineering. Her research interests are mainly in the field of neuroimaging, brain connectivity, imaging genetics and the exploitation of explainable AI methods for answering the inherent research questions.

We approached Prof. Gloria Menegaz with a few questions to learn more:

1. What was the most important factor in your success?

2. Failures are an inevitable part of everyone’s career journey, what is the most important lesson you learned during your career when dealing with failures?

To never give up! Failures are parts of the game. Being a researcher means to take challenges that are difficult and you must be aware that there is no guarantee of success. Whatever the outcome, what is important is what you learn along the path, and to learn from your own mistakes. One thing that I would suggest to young researcher is to dive deep into the issues without yielding to the temptation of giving up and turning to another. In my experience, failures help in understanding what is wrong in our approach, and thus to dive deeply into the problem, or to change perspective, to get over it and get closer and closer to the solution. Once again, failures teach resilience, while success feeds self confidence.

3. Please share your work of societal impact with us.

The societal impact of my work is due to the translational character of my research. My main field of research is neuroimaging and imaging genetics, that is a branch of biomedical signal and image processing focusing on brain structure and function as well as on the investigation of the interplay between genetic determinants and image-derive endophenotypes. Basically, we analyze and model signals that represent either the microstructure of brain tissues or the neurophysiological signals that are measured in different conditions, that is either in resting state or while performing specific tasks, and investigate the link with the genetic information, when it is available. Such models can be exploited in wide spectrum of fields and applications, ranging from basic neurosciences, where the target is to investigate brain structure and function per-se, to the clinical field, where they support diverse applications, from early diagnosis of neurodegenerative diseases, while enabling the identification of new numerical disease biomarkers, to surgical planning. This clearly points to precision medicine, which has the ambitious aim of subject-specific care and treatment. Of course, the substrate of this research, besides signal processing, is explainable artificial intelligence, that allows modeling complex non-linear relationships among multi-modal data with unprecedented effectiveness and performance. In summary, the societal impact regards the neuroscience and clinical field, targeting improved healthcare technologies and precision medicine.

4. During these COVID times, the teaching and learning has become online for some time as of now. What do you think are some of the challenges being faced in carrying out quality teaching as well as quality research? Do you have any suggestions for students and faculty?

To learn more about Prof. Gloria Menegaz, please visit her webpage.