Keynote Speakers

We are excited to announce two distinguished keynote speakers for IPMI'2025.

Steve M. Pizer, PhD

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Biography: Stephen M. Pizer received Bachelor degrees in applied mathematics from Brown University in 1963 and the PhD in computer science from Harvard in 1967. From 1962 to 1973 he was a member of the Physics Research Laboratory at Massachusetts General Hospital, and since 1967 he has been on the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). A Kenan Professor of Computer Science, Radiation Oncology, Radiology, and Biomedical Engineering at UNC, he founded and has led UNC’s multidepartmental Medical Image Display & Analysis Group. He is on the faculty of Computer Science’s Graphics and Image Laboratory and is co-founder and chairman of the board of Morphormics, Inc. His research, centered since 1962 on medical image processing and display, presently focuses on image and object shape analysis, 3D visualization of medical images, probability on shape and appearance models, and segmentation. Other research directions have included interactive 3D graphics, human vision, image quality analysis, contrast enhancement, and image restoration. He is the author of a book on medial representations, 2 books on numerical computing, 3 proceedings in computer graphics and image analysis, and over 290 published chapters and journal and proceedings articles. He is Fellow of the MICCAI Society. For many years he was Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging.

Shaoting Zhang, PhD

Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Biography: Dr. Shaoting Zhang is the Dean of Qingyuan Research Institute at the School of Computer Science of Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He once held the position of tenured faculty member in the Department of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in the United States, and the Director of the Smart Healthcare Center at the Shanghai AI Laboratory, among other positions. His research achievements have won the Young Scientist Award and the Best Paper Award at top international conferences, as well as the Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award of the Oak Ridge Associated Universities in the United States. He led the research and development of the world's first platform of medical multi-modal foundation models, OpenMEDLab. It aims to provide open-source capability support for AI medical applications that are "cross-domain, cross-disease, and cross-modal." He has published more than 200 papers, with over 22,000 citations and an H-Index of 70. He also serves as a Program Chair of IPMI’25, a top conference in medical image analysis, and CVPR’26, a top conference in computer vision.

Leon Axel, PhD, MD

NYU Grossman School of Medicine

Biography: Leon Axel, PhD, MD, is a radiologist specializing in cardiovascular magnetic resonance imaging (CMRI). He received the PhD from Princeton University and the MD from UC, San Francisco. After training in radiology at UC, San Francisco, he joined the faculty at University of Pennsylvania; he is currently at NYU Grossman School of Medicine. His research interests include development of CMRI methods for imaging and analysis of cardiac function.