People

Current team members in ERNIS and PhD and Master students I am currently supervising or have supervised.

Team Members

Laurent Chen

Junior Researcher

Department of Advanced Computing Sciences, Maastricht University

Laurent is currently a junior researcher for our NWO AiNed XS project in collaboration with TU Dresden. He works on asynchronous event-driven neural networks for neuromorphic supercomputing. Laurent also finished his master thesis at ERNIS, working on building the software simulation and training framework for asynchronous neural networks.

2025 - Present

Dr. Tao Sun

Postdoctoral Researcher

Department of Advanced Computing Sciences, Maastricht University

Tao is currently a senior researcher in our team leading research projects and contributing to computer science education. He works on spiking neural networks and neuromorphic computing for speech processing and bio-medical applications.

2025 - Present

PhD Students

Tim Dick

PhD Candidate

MACSBio Systems Biology & Bioinformatics, Maastricht University

Co-supervised with Prof. Elia Formisano

Interests: Brain-inspired Computing, Computational Neuroscience

2025 - Present

Afsana Khan

PhD Candidate

Department of Advanced Computing Sciences, Maastricht University

Co-supervised with Prof. Anna Wilbik and Dr. Marijn ten Thij (Tilburg University)

Interests: Federated Learning, Data Fusion

2022 - Present

Master Students

Joshua Kramer

Master Student (Master AI)

Department of Advanced Computing Sciences, Maastricht University

Joshua is doing his research internship project at ERNIS on edge small language model with Nvidia Jetson.

2026 - Present

Sepideh Ghanaat

Master Student (Master AI)

Department of Advanced Computing Sciences, Maastricht University

Sepideh is doing her research internship project at ERNIS on optimizing asynchronous SNNs on SpiNNaker2 neuromorphic processor.

2026 - Present

Bas Körver

Master Student (Master AI)

Department of Advanced Computing Sciences, Maastricht University

Bas is finishing his master thesis project on event-based vision and automatic data collection system for biodiversity monitoring of insects.

2025 - Present

Aurora Pia Ghiardelli

Master Student (Master AI)

imec & Department of Advanced Computing Sciences, Maastricht University

Aurora is finishing her master thesis project at imec on intracortical neural signal processing jointly supervised by Dr. Yao-Hong Liu (imec). She has done her research internship project at ERNIS on reliable, energy-efficient framework for 3D brain tumor segmentation using spiking neural networks. The result of the project is accepted at ISBI 2026, the premier scientific conference for biomidical imaging. See her paper here.

2024 - Present

Previous Members

Tudor Hermenean

Master Student (Master AI)

Department of Advanced Computing Sciences, Maastricht University

Tudor finished his master research internship project at ERNIS. He worked on a project developing low-latency person detection with event-based vision and FPGA-based AI acceleration. He built a low-latency object detection pipeline using Prophesee 1Mpix event-based camera and AMD KV260. His pipeline and developed demo will be open source in the near future.

2025 - 2026

Tauseef Ahmed

Master Student (Master AI)

imec & Department of Advanced Computing Sciences, Maastricht University

Tauseef finished his master thesis at imec working on event-driven state space models for speech recognition and neuromorphic software simulation. His project was jointly supervised by Kanishkan Vadivel (imec). The results of his thesis is currently submitted to a conference and under review.

2025 - 2026

Sudi Wang

Master Student (Master Data Science and Decision Making)

Department of Advanced Computing Sciences, Maastricht University

Sudi finished her master thesis at ERNIS. Her project worked on KV-cache compression for LLMs using recurrent memory states and efficient training policies. She was invited to give an oral presentation of her thesis work in the Application in AI track of NWO ICT.OPEN 2025.

2024 - 2025

Ismael Gomez Garrido

Master Student (Master AI)

Department of Advanced Computing Sciences, Maastricht University

Ismael finished his master thesis at ERNIS. His work shows it is possible to perform full integer arithmetic online training for spiking neural networks, paving the way for very efficient neural network training on embedded devices. His thesis work is published at ICANN 2025 and he gave an oral presentation on the paper in the conference at Kaunas in September of 2025. See his paper here.

2024 - 2025

Francesca Rivelli

Master Student (Master AI)

Department of Advanced Computing Sciences, Maastricht University

Francesca finished her master research internship project at ERNIS. Her work on ultra-efficient intracortical neural decoding using adaptively pruned spiking neural networks is published at EMBC 2025, the premier scientific conference for biomidical engineering. She presented the poster of her paper in EMBC at Copenhagen in the summer of 2025. See her paper here.

2024 - 2025