Florian Solzbacher

Dr. Solzbacher is co-founder and Chairman of Blackrock Neurotech. He is also Professor and Chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Director of the Center for Engineering Innovation at the University of Utah. Florian holds adjunct appointments as Professor in Materials Science and Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Utah. He is a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineers AIMBE and a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers IEEE. Prof. Solzbacher received his M.Sc. EE (Dipl.-Ing.) from the Technical University Berlin in 1997 and his Ph.D. (Dr.-Ing.) from the Technical University Ilmenau in 2003. He is co-founder of several companies including Blackrock Microsystems, Blackrock Neuromed, Blackrock Microsystems Europe, Sentiomed, First Sensor Technology and several others. He was a board member and Chairman of the German Association for Sensor Technology AMA and of Sensor + Test from 2001 until 2009. Florian was director of the Utah Nanofabrication Laboratory until 2013 and served on a number of company and public private partnership advisory and reviewer boards in Europe and the US including the DFG German Excellence Initiative, the European Research Council ERC, The Utah Governor’s Science and Technology advisory board and on international conference steering committees such as the NIH/NINDS Neural Interfaces Conference. He was Co-Chair of the 2012 NIH Neural Interfaces Conference and the 2014 COMS Conference for Commercialization of Micro and Nanosystems. He is author of over 190 journal and conference publications, 5 book chapters and 16 pending patents.