Directors

Dr. Roberto Souza is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Software Engineering at the University of Calgary, Canada, where he has been a faculty member since July 2020. Dr. Souza received his B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from the Federal University of Pará (2012), and his M.Sc. (2014) and Ph.D. (2017) in Computer Engineering from the University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Brazil.

Before joining the University of Calgary as faculty, Dr. Souza completed three years of postdoctoral training in the Department of Radiology, where he worked closely with clinicians, medical physicists, and neuroscientists on clinically driven imaging problems. He also has international research experience as a visiting researcher and intern at the Grenoble Institute of Technology (France) and the University of Pennsylvania (USA).

Dr. Souza’s research lies at the intersection of medical image processing, machine learning, and data integration, with a particular focus on developing robust and data-efficient AI methods for medical imaging. His work spans image reconstruction, segmentation, and analysis, with applications in neuroimaging, oncology, and infant MRI. A recurring theme in his research is the development of hybrid and longitudinal learning approaches that integrate imaging data with prior knowledge or complementary clinical information to improve performance, interpretability, and clinical relevance.

For more details about Dr. Souza’s work, please check his Google Scholar and University Profile pages.

Dr. Mariana Bento is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Calgary, with a joint appointment in the Department of Electrical and Software Engineering. Dr. Bento is a full member of the Hotchkiss Brain Institute and a recipient of funding from NSERC, MITACS, NFRF, ALberta Innovates, among other funding agencies.

Dr. Bento received her B.Sc. in Teleinformatics Engineering from the Federal University of Ceará (2011), followed by M.Sc. (2013) and Ph.D. (2016) degrees in Computer Engineering from the University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Brazil. Prior to her faculty appointment, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Departments of Radiology and Clinical Neurosciences at the University of Calgary, where she worked on advanced neuroimaging and machine learning methods in close collaboration with clinicians and neuroscientists.

Her research focuses on Artificial Intelligence for healthcare, with particular emphasis on medical image processing and machine learning for aging and dementia. A central theme of Dr. Bento’s work is the development of responsible, trustworthy, and fair AI models, explicitly addressing bias, demographic variability, and heterogeneity arising from multi-site and multi-scanner data. She has led research on integrating and aggregating large, heterogeneous, and multimodal datasets, improving model robustness, generalizability, and clinical translatability across institutions and populations.

Dr. Bento is also deeply committed to open science, developing and maintaining open-source neuroimaging tools and contributing to community-driven datasets and reproducible research practices. In parallel, she is actively engaged in equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) initiatives, including organizing and delivering workshops aimed at broadening participation and awareness in AI and medical imaging research.

For more details about Dr. Bento’s work, please check her Google Scholar and University Profile pages.