José del R. Millán
Carol Cockrell Curran Endowed Chair
Professor

Dr. José del R. Millán is a professor and holds the Linda Steen Norris & Lee Norris Endowed Chair in Neuroengineering in the Chandra Family Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. He is also a professor in the Department of Neurology at Dell Medical School, professor (by Courtesy) in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, faculty of the Mulva Clinic for the Neurosciences, and member of the Interdisciplinary Neuroscience Program. He is the Director of Texas Robotics.

Dr. Millán received a PhD in computer science from the Technical University of Catalonia, Barcelona, in 1992. Prior to joining UT Austin, he was a Professor and Defitech Foundation Chair in Brain-Machine Interface at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland (EPFL), where he helped establish the Center for Neuroprosthetics. Previously, he was a research scientist at the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission in Ispra (Italy) and a senior researcher at the Idiap Research Institute in Martigny (Switzerland).

Dr. Millán has made fundamental contributions to the field of noninvasive brain-computer interfaces (BCI) based on electroencephalogram signals and has pioneered the design of brain-controlled robots (wheelchairs, telepresence robots, and exoskeletons). He has advanced BCI technology beyond the laboratory through translational studies in people with motor disabilities, demonstrating that BCI-driven motor training promotes cortical reorganization and facilitates post-stroke rehabilitation—a finding widely replicated across the field. Dr. Millán has received several recognitions for these seminal and pioneering achievements, notably the IEEE-SMC Nobert Wiener Award in 2011, elevation to IEEE Fellow in 2017, and elected Fellow of the International Academy of Medical and Biological Engineering in 2020. Dr. Millán served as President of the International BCI Society from 2019 to 2021 and was a member of its Board from the Society’s inception in 2015 until 2023.