Bringing together physical and life sciences

摘要

Treatments of vision and hearing loss, epilepsy, Parkinson's disease and spinal injuries will all be investigated alongside advanced scientific modelling, complex data processing, and the development of autonomous systems in the new Centre for Neural Engineering (CfNE) which opened last month at the University of Melbourne. The facility will undertake interdisciplinary research in neurosdence and neural diseases and aim to gain a better understanding of the human brain as well as diseases of the central nervous system. CfNE will bring together neuroscientists, neurologists, psychiatrists, cell biologists, geneticists, electrophysicists, chemists, physicists and engineers from the University of Melbourne and partner institutions including Florey Neuroscience Institutes, NICTA, Bionic Vision Australia, Bionics Institute, Melbourne Brain Centre, Royal Melbourne Hospital, Austin Health and St Vincents Hospital. The new centre's director Professor Stan Skafidas, from the University of Melbourne's Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, has a respected international reputation for his work in the development of microelectronics, wireless communication and other communication systems. As a cofounder of the company Bandspeed, he was responsible for research and new product development and coinvented Adaptive Frequency Hopping, a coexistence mechanism that is an important part of the Bluetooth standard. This technology is part of every Bluetooth device (ver 1.2 and later).