People
Current team members in ERNIS and PhD and Master students I am currently supervising or have supervised.
Team Members
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
Aurora Pia Ghiardelli
Junior Researcher
Department of Advanced Computing Sciences, Maastricht University
Aurora joined ERNIS as a Junior Researcher in November 2026 after completing her master’s thesis at imec on intracortical neural signal processing, jointly supervised by Dr. Yao-Hong Liu (imec), and winning the FSE thesis award. Her earlier research internship at ERNIS developed a reliable, energy-efficient framework for 3D brain tumor segmentation using spiking neural networks, resulting in a paper accepted at ISBI 2026. Read her ISBI paper.
2024 - 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
Master Students
Joshua Kramer
Master Student (Master AI)
imec & Department of Advanced Computing Sciences, Maastricht University
Joshua completed his research internship at ERNIS on small language models at the edge using NVIDIA Jetson. His paper with Dr. Guangzhi Tang, “Edge Interactive Agent for Type 1 Diabetes Self-Management with Continuous Glucose Monitoring,” was published at the WearAgent workshop at UbiComp/ISWC 2026. He is now working on his master’s thesis at imec under the continued supervision of Dr. Guangzhi Tang. View the workshop programme.
2026 - Present
Frederik Grüneberg
Master Student (Master AI)
Department of Advanced Computing Sciences, Maastricht University
Frederik started his master’s thesis at ERNIS in 2026 under the supervision of Dr. Guangzhi Tang. He works on efficient neuromorphic methods for quantum error correction.
2026 - Present
Tudor Hermenean
Master Student (Master AI)
imec & Department of Advanced Computing Sciences, Maastricht University
Tudor completed his master’s research internship at ERNIS on low-latency person detection with event-based vision and FPGA-based AI acceleration. He built an object detection pipeline using a Prophesee 1Mpix event-based camera and AMD KV260. He is now working on his master’s thesis at imec under the continued supervision of Dr. Guangzhi Tang.
2025 - Present
Previous Members
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 were published at IJCNN. Read the paper.
2025 - 2026
Karmanya Raizada
Master Student (Master AI)
Department of Advanced Computing Sciences, Maastricht University
Karmanya completed his master’s thesis at ERNIS under the supervision of Dr. Guangzhi Tang during 2025–2026. Together with Joshua Kramer, he won the Most Creative Student Challenge Award at UbiComp/ISWC 2026 for “Poisoning the Hearth.” The project explored security threats to AI-powered smart homes and developed safeguards against misleading visual inputs, supervised by Dr. Theodor Schnitzler and Dr. Guangzhi Tang. View the award.
2025 - 2026
Bas Körver
Master Student (Master AI)
Department of Advanced Computing Sciences, Maastricht University
Bas completed his master’s thesis at ERNIS in 2026 on event-based vision and automated data collection for biodiversity monitoring of insects. He has a paper published at the NeVi workshop at ECCV 2026. Read the paper.
2025 - 2026
Sepideh Ghanaat
Master Student (Master AI)
Department of Advanced Computing Sciences, Maastricht University
Sepideh completed her master’s thesis at ERNIS in 2026 on optimizing asynchronous spiking neural networks on the SpiNNaker2 neuromorphic processor.
2026 - 2026
Dr. Afsana Khan
PhD Graduate
Department of Advanced Computing Sciences, Maastricht University
Afsana defended her PhD thesis, “Unlocking Value of Data with Vertical Federated Learning,” on 11 June 2026. She was supervised by Prof. Anna Wilbik and co-supervised by Dr. Marijn ten Thij and Dr. Guangzhi Tang. View her PhD defence details.
Interests: Federated Learning, Data Fusion
2022 - 2026
Laurent Chen
Junior Researcher
Department of Advanced Computing Sciences, Maastricht University
Laurent worked as a Junior Researcher on our NWO AiNed XS project in collaboration with TU Dresden until September 2026. He researched asynchronous event-driven neural networks for neuromorphic supercomputing. He also completed his master’s thesis at ERNIS, developing a software simulation and training framework for asynchronous neural networks.
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