Jean-François is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Dalhousie University and Associate Scientific Director of Transforming Climate Action at the Ocean Frontier Institute. He joined Dalhousie in 2013 to establish a research lab in underwater communications with strong industry collaboration, focusing on improving acoustic communication in time-varying channels. His work includes programming physical layers on reconfigurable SoCs and developing DSP algorithms to mitigate distortive acoustic propagation. He is particularly interested in enabling underwater networks with low-power electronic systems. In 2022, his team built an embedded system to detect harbour porpoises, deployed in the Bay of Fundy to prevent turbine entanglement. He is also developing a magneto-inductive communication link enhanced with quantum sensors to cross the air-water boundary.

Kamal is a Professor and the Director of the Mixed Signal Integrated Circuits Laboratory at Dalhousie, where he has established a robust research program focused on semiconductor integrated circuit (IC) design. With over 15 years of collaboration with Canadian industries and research centers, he has specialized in the development of analog, digital and mixed-signal integrated circuits. Since joining Dalhousie in 2006, he has supervised the graduation of over 40 PhD and MASc students who are currently employed by leading companies across Canada, the U.S. and globally in various sectors of IC design. Notable companies employing his graduates include Advanced Micro Devices, Synopsys, Alphawave Semi, Skyworks Solutions, Ciena and Marvell Technology. Additionally, in the past two years, two of his PhD graduates have secured faculty positions at Canadian and U.S. universities. Kamal has been awarded over 20 research grants (as PI or co-PI) totaling more than $12 million at Dalhousie University. His recent research activities focus on low-power circuits and systems design, time-domain analog-to-digital converters and signal processing, clock synchronization, power distribution, biomedical circuits, forward error correction, and machine learning integrated circuits.

Parisa has a PhD. in Biomedical Engineering. Her areas of interest include ultrasound and electro-magnetics, as well as signal and image processing, modelling in underwater communication, and biomedical engineering.