Professor Charles Unsworth

Professor Charles Unsworth received his PhD in 1997 from the University of St Andrews in Millimeter-Wave Physics. He was a Higher Scientific Officer at the Defence Evaluation Research Agency (DERA) at the Ministry of Defence, UK, in the area of Radar hardware. He completed a three-year Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh in Radar Signal Processing and a two-year Postdoctoral Mobility Fellowship at Edinburgh University collaborating with the Royal Hospital of Sick Children, Edinburgh, in the Biomedical Signal Processing of Epilepsy. He joined the Department of Engineering Science & Biomedical Engineering at the University of Auckland in 2002. His group specialise in the field of Neural Engineering and in particular: Neural Chip Discovery Platforms (in vitro), Advanced Nonlinear Signal & Image Processing, Artificial Neural Networks & Machine Learning and Computational Neuroscience.

Charles was the recipient of a prestigious Royal Society of New Zealand James Cook Research Fellowship and an Adjunct Professor of Neural Chip Technology at Tampere University in Finland in 2020. He is an Associate Investigator at the MacDiarmid Institute and has been involved in and received > $20M competitive research funding from the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, the Health Research Council and Royal Society of New Zealand as well as $48M Tertiary Education Commission (CoRE) funding. Recently, he established and directs a multi-disciplinary Centre of Neural Engineering & Cell Technologies (CoNECT) consisting of 50+ members from the Faculties of Medical Health Sciences, Science and Engineering.