Prof. Metin Akay received his B.S. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey in 1981 and 1984, respectively and a Ph.D. degree from Rutgers University in 1990.

He has played a key role in promoting the biomedical education in the world by writing several prestigous books and editing the Biomedical Engineering Book Series published by the Wiley and IEEE Press Prof Akay is author/coauthor/editor of 14 books and giving more 50 keynote, plenary and invited talks at the international meetings including the first, second and third Latin-American Conference on Biomedical Engineering'98, 01, 04. He is the founding chair of the Annual International Summer School on Biocomplexity from System, to Gene sponsored by the NSF and Dartmouth College and techincally co-sponsored by the IEEE EMBS, of the Satellite Conference on Emerging Technologies in Biomedical Engineering. He is also the founding chair of the International IEEE Conference on Neural Engineering, in 2003. These activities were sponsored by the NSF and largely attended by the women and minorities. He is a strong supporter of the women and minorities in the engineering, medicine and science in the world.

He is also the first chair of the steering committee of the IEEE Transaction on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics sponsored by the IEEE (CS, EMBS, NN, etc.) and non-IEEE societies. He was the invited guest editor for the special issues of Bioinformatics: Proteomics and Genomics Engineering of the Proc of IEEE, the most highly cited IEEE Journal, Nov and Dec 2002. He was also the invited guest editor for the special issue of Neural Engineering at the same journal. He is currently editing several books on "Genomics and Proteomics Engineering in Medicine and Biology" and "Neural Engineering" with the Wiley. He is also the founding editor-in-chief of the first biomedical engineering encyclopedia published by the Wiley and Sons.

Prof. Akay is a recepient of the IEEE EMBS Service Award, a IEEE Third Millenium Medal an the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society Early Career Achievement Award 1997. He also received the Young Investigator Award of the Sigma Xi Society, Northeast Region in 1998 and 2000 for "his outstanding research activity and the ability to communicate the importance of his research to the general public. He was invited to speak at the NPR on Neural Engineering and write an article at the Boston Globe about the Engineering Education.

Dr. Akay is a fellow of Institute of Physics, senior member of IEEE, a member of BMES, Eta Kappa, Sigma Xi, Tau Beta Pi. He also serves on the editorial or advisory board of several international journals including the IEEE T-BME, IEEE T-NSRE, IEEE T-ITIB, Proc of IEEE, Journal of Neural Engineering, NIH Neural Engineering and Bioengineering partnership study sections and several NSF review panels.

Dr. Akay's Neural Engineering and Informatics Lab is interested in developing an intelligent wearable system for monitoring motor tasks in Parkinson and Post-Stroke Disease Subjects and investigating the the developmental abnormalities of medullary respiratory neurons during early maturation and the sudden infant death syndromes. In addition, his group is interested in investigating the functional/structural relationships of oncogene protein sequences.