Riccardo Poli is a full professor in CSEE at Essex where he is the director of postgraduate research studies and the coordinator of the BCI Lab. Prof Poli is a biomedical engineer (by first degree, PhD and subsequent research) and an expert in genetic and evolutionary computation, and more generally machine learning and computational intelligence. He is a Senior Fellow of the International Society for Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (now ACM SIGEVO) and a  recipient of the Evo* award for outstanding contributions to the field of evolutionary computation. He has over 320refereed publications  (and two books), of which 60+ in bioengineering, BCI and related areas and the rest in computational intelligence. Prof Poli is an advisory board member of Evolutionary Computation and was an associate editor of the Journal of Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines published by Springer, of the Applied Soft Computing Journal published by Elsevier and of Swarm Intelligence published by Springer, until early 2014 when he resigned from these roles to free up research time. He was also a member of the executive committee of the Special Interest Group on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (SigEVO) of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) until 2013, but asked not to be considered for re-election for the same reasons. Prof Poli has been chair of numerous international conferences, including the 2004 edition of ACM SigEVO’s Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, the largest conference in this field, a tutorial/keynote speaker at 30 international conferences and Summer schools, a programme committee member of approximately 80 international workshops and conferences and a reviewer for 15 international journals. As PI and Co-I he received funding for approximately €4,000,000 in his career. According to Google Scholar he has well over 18,000 citations and an H-index of  52. His work on collaborative BCIs has recently appeared in the New Scientist, the Financial Times magazine and many others.