Prof. Adela Ben-Yakar, Ph.D

Professor, Harry L. Kent, Jr. Professor of Mechanical Engineering
The University of Texas at Austin, USA

Adela Ben-Yakar is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford University and completed a postdoctoral work at Stanford and Harvard Universities in the Applied Physics Departments. Her research focuses on the development of opto-fluidic systems for high-throughput screening, ultrafast laser microsurgery, nonlinear imaging, and clinical image-guided surgery. Dr. Ben-Yakar is an OSA and AIMBE Fellow, and the recipient of the Fulbright Scholarship, Zonta Amelia Earhart Award, NSF Career Award, Human Frontier Science Program Research Award, NIH Director’s Transformative Award, and SBI2 President’s Research Award.

Keynote Talk title: Ultrafast Laser Phonosurgery for Biomaterial Localization in Scarred Vocal Folds

Prof. Hanspeter Herzel, Ph.D

Professor, Institute for Theoretical Biology
Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin and Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany

Hanspeter Herzel studied physics at Humboldt University Berlin. He received his PhD in 1986 with a thesis on stochastic and chaotic processes.

Afterwards his reseach was devoted to the nonlinear dynamics of voice production. He studied nonlinear phenomena in newborns cries, voice patients, and animals by combining biomechanical modeling with data analysis. Currently he works as a professor of Theoretical Biology at the Charite Berlin with a focus on chronobiology. He was a co-founder of the AQL conferences and hosted the ICVPB 1999 in Berlin bringing together human voice research with animal bioacoustics

Keynote Talk title: Nonlinear Phenomena in Voice Research

Workshop title: Understanding Biological Oscillators

Prof. Seong Keun Kwon, M.D., Ph.D.

Professor, Department of Otorhinolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery
Seoul National University Hospital , Republic of Korea

Dr. Seong Keun Kwon is the professor in the Department of Otorhinolaryngology-Head and neck surgery at Seoul National University Hospital. He received his MD (1996), MS (2004), and PhD (2007) degrees at Seoul National University in the Department of Otorhinolaryngology-Head and neck surgery. His clinical practice is mainly focused on airway stenosis, salivary gland disease, head and neck cancer, disease of vocal cord, and patients with dysphagia. As an ENT doctor, he has been concentrating on the regenerating the trachea, vocal fold, salivary gland and oral mucosa with various scaffold, growth factors and stem cells. In recognition of his achievement in the tissue engineering research, he has received the Casselberry award for rejuvenation of aged vocal fold from the American Laryngological Association in 2018. He was the 27th recipient of this award which was established in 1906. He also received Broyles-Malony award for tracheal regeneration in 2016 from the American Bronchoesophagological association, and also received numerous domestic academic awards. He has served as an active member of the Korean Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine Society and Korean Biomaterials Society over 10 years and now a member of academic committee. He developed, organized and hosted several joint workshops between Korean Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine Society and Korean Otorhinolaryngology-Head and neck society since 2011 to enhance the research on the tissue engineering for the head and neck defect. This workshop has enabled and promoted collaborative research between many otolaryngologists and tissue engineering researchers.

Keynote Talk title: Augmenting the Glottic Gap with Tissue Engineering Approaches

Workshop title: 3 Dimensional Culture of Stem Cells: its benefits and technical pitfalls.
Topics covered in the workshop will include anatomy, microscopy, specimen preparation and preservation, animal models, cell choices, scaffolds, surgical techniques, functional assessment.

Prof. Jennifer L. Long, M.D., Ph.D

Associate Professor, Department of Head and Neck Surgery
University of California-Los Angeles, and Greater Los Angeles VA Health System

Dr. Jennifer Long is a laryngologist and Associate Professor at the University of California-Los Angeles. She obtained her MD and PhD degrees at the University of Minnesota, studying Chemical Engineering and Materials Science. She then completed clinical residency in Head and Neck Surgery at UCLA, followed by a fellowship in Laryngology and Voice Disorders. Her research focuses on regenerative medicine approaches to laryngeal disorders. Her lab has been funded by the American Laryngological Association, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the National Institutes of Health.

Keynote Talk title: Cell-based outer vocal fold replacement (COVR): Development in vitro and advances in vivo

Workshop title: Practicalities of cell and tissue studies in the larynx.
Topics covered in the workshop will include anatomy, microscopy, specimen preparation and preservation, animal models, cell choices, scaffolds, surgical techniques, functional assessment.

Prof. Rupal Patel, Ph.D, CCC-SLP

Professor, College of Computer & Information Science and Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders
Northeastern University, USA

CEO, VocaliD

Rupal Patel is founder and CEO of VocaliD, a voice AI company that creates custom digital voices. VocaliD’s award-winning technology empowers individuals living with speechlessness to be heard as themselves and brings things-that-talk to life through its uniquely crafted vocal persona. Rupal is currently on leave from Northeastern University where she is a tenured professor in the College of Computer and Information Science and the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders. She also holds appointments at Harvard/MIT, University of Massachusetts, and Haskins Laboratory at Yale University. Rupal’s research focuses on speech motor control in healthy talkers and those with neuromotor speech impairment; this empirical evidence is then applied to the design of technologies that enable, enrich and enhance communication. A native of Canada, she earned her bachelor’s degree from University of Calgary, her master’s and PhD from University of Toronto and completed post-doctoral training at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Rupal was recently named one of Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative people in Business and her work has been featured on TED, NPR, and in leading news and technology outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, BBC, Wired, Bloomberg, and BuzzFeed.

Keynote Talk Title: How can voice scientists enhance Voice AI and protect us from its perils?

Workshop Title: From Lab to Venture: The process of commercializing research innovations

Prof. Robert Zatorre, Ph.D

Professor, Dept. of Neurology and Neurosurgery, Dept. of Psychology
McGill University, Canada

Dr. Zatorre is a cognitive neuroscientist at the Montreal Neurological Institute of McGill University. His principal interests relate to the neural substrate for auditory cognition, with special emphasis on two complex and characteristically human abilities: speech and music. He and his collaborators have published over 280 scientific papers on a variety of topics including pitch perception, musical imagery, absolute pitch, music and emotion, perception of auditory space, and brain plasticity in the blind and the deaf. In 2005 he was named holder of a James McGill chair in Neuroscience. In 2006 he became the founding co-director of the international laboratory for Brain, Music, and Sound research (BRAMS), a unique multi-university consortium with state-of-the art facilities dedicated to the cognitive neuroscience of music. In 2011 he was awarded the IPSEN foundation prize in neuronal plasticity, and in 2013 he won the Knowles prize in hearing research from Northwestern University. He lives in Montreal with his wife and collaborator Virginia Penhune, professor of psychology at Concordia University. He tries to keep up his baroque repertoire on the organ whenever he can get a chance.