Dr. Alejandro Terrazas is president of VRSciences, a startup company developing VR therapies for the treatment of mental disorders including addiction and age-related memory impairments. The company also conducts research and develops software for simulation and training in virtual urban environments. Alex is an expert in functional brain imaging, neurophysiology and the brain mechanisms of navigation and memory formation in virtual environments. He previously held the position of associate director of the Machine Interface Network Design (MIND) Lab at Michigan State University where he oversaw research in telepresence, virtual environments, and 3D graphics. Dr. Terrazas received his Ph.D. in Cognition and Neural Systems from the University of Arizona.
John Ostuni graduated from Rutgers University with a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering. Since that time, he has worked at the National Institutes of Health where he is currently a senior staff scientist in the Warren Grant Magnuson Clinical Center. He has taught various courses in Java and C++, and his current interests are medical image processing and converting research-based software into clinical applications. He currently resides in Maryland with his wife Sandra and his two sons Steven and Anthony.
Dr. Michael Barlow (he prefers simply to be called Spike) is the founding director of the Virtual Environment and Simulation Laboratory (VESL) and a senior lecturer within the School of Computer Science at the University of New South Wales, ADFA (Australian Defence Force Academy).
For the past 15 years, Spike has been an active researcher in the area of media and speech recognition in particular, including a stint of two years in Japan's NTT (Nippon Telegraph and Telephone) Human Interface Laboratories working on Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition. His other major research areas include virtual environments for scientific visualization and education and multi-agent systems for simulation and modeling.
Spike has taught Java at the university level for several years. He currently teaches courses on OO programming, data structures, multimedia, and virtual environments.