BERKELEY, Calif., /PRNewswire/ -- Seven of the world's leading experts in baby brain development, neuroscience, engineering, and business innovation have agreed to serve on the Smilables Scientific Advisory Board, the company announced. Bringing the most advanced scientific tools and academic expertise in infant brain development to every day parenting moments enables parents to "feed their baby's hungry brain" in the critical first 24 months following birth.
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Members of the Smilables Scientific Advisory Board include:
Charles A. Nelson III, Ph.D is Professor of Pediatrics and Neuroscience at Harvard Medical School and Professor of Education at Harvard University. Dr. Nelson also holds the Richard David Scott Chair in Pediatric Developmental Medicine Research at Boston Children's Hospital, where he is also the Director of Research in the Division of Developmental Medicine.
Fei Xu, Ph.D is a Professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Xu is the head of the Berkeley Early Learning Lab, and her research focuses on early cognitive and language development. Dr. Xu and her students have been investigating early learning mechanisms, and are particularly interested in how infants and young children make broad generalizations from specific evidence in domains such as physical reasoning, social cognition, and word learning.
Scott Johnson, Ph.D is a Professor of Psychology and a Professor of Psychiatry & Biobehavioral Sciences at UCLA. Dr. Johnson serves as Research Director of the UCLA Baby Lab. His research concerns the origins and development of perception and cognition in humans, with a focus on attention, speech perception, face perception, object knowledge, learning mechanisms, brain development, and developmental disabilities.
Abbas El Gamal, Ph.D is the Chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. Dr. El Gamal is the most recent member to join the Scientific Advisory Board. Dr. El Gamal's research achievements span multiple areas, from network information theory to digital imaging devices and systems. He has also played founding roles in several successful Silicon Valley companies, as well as serving on corporate boards of directors and advisory boards of several semiconductor and biotech startup companies.
Kristofer Pister, Ph.D is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley. Dr. Pister is the founder and CTO of Dust Networks, and is known for his academic work on micro-electromechanical systems and their simulation. He is the inventor of Smart Dust, and is widely regarded as a visionary researcher in wireless sensor networks.
Tarek I. Zohdi, Ph.D is Chairman of the Computational and Data Science and Engineering Program at UC Berkeley. Dr. Zohdi is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering and a UC Berkeley Chancellor's Professor. He also holds a staff scientist position at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, and is an Adjunct Scientist at the Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute. He is a past President of the United States Association for Computational Mechanics.
Rajiv Lal, Ph.D is the Stanley Roth, Sr. Professor of Retailing at Harvard Business School. Dr. Lal has been responsible for Harvard's retailing curriculum and has served as the course head for Marketing, required for study in the MBA program. He most recently taught the MBA course on Design Thinking and Innovation. Professor Lal also teaches in several Executive Education programs, has previously served as the Faculty Chair for the Global Management Program, and currently co-chairs the program on Building and Leading a Customer Centric Organization.
Based in Berkeley, CA, Smilables Inc. (www.smilables.com) has created a first-of-its-kind, fully-integrated system comprised of a smart wearable baby ankle bracelet coupled with smartphone-delivered modules structured for parental interactions with their infant. The Smilables system equips parents with customized day-to-day lessons and interactions for the baby brain, which develops at the rate of a million synapses every second. An adaptive feedback mechanism allows parents to monitor their baby's developmental progress on a weekly basis.
"Helping babies and parents worldwide benefit from the deep scientific expertise embedded in our system is our true human contribution," said Dr. A. K. Pradeep, founder and Chief Executive Officer of Smilables Inc. "We are exceptionally fortunate to have the world's leading scientific minds on our Advisory Board as we drive towards the international launch of our system this year."