Margaret Lech

Professor Margaret Lech holds a position as Discipline Leader in the Department of Electrical & Electronic Engineering at RMIT University's School of Engineering. She has been at RMIT since 1998, progressing from a Research Fellow to her current role as Professor. Her expertise spans machine learning, signal processing, speech and image processing, and biomedical applications.

Education: MSc in Physics from the University of Maria Curie-Sklodowska (Poland), PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Melbourne. Research highlights include groundbreaking emotion detection from speech signals, clinical depression analysis, and conversational trust modeling. She has co-authored over 160 papers and holds an international patent for her work on emotion detection.

• Awards: Telstra Innovation Challenge 2010, Vice-Chancellor's Research Supervision Excellence Award (2013), RMIT Award for Excellence in Graduate Research (2019).
• Grants: VPAC, ARC Linkage, DSI, AOARD, DSTG, and current co-investigator on Office of National Intelligence and ARC Discovery grants.

Her research focuses on applications of AI and machine learning in healthcare, cybersecurity (e.g., Smart Grids), robotics (multi-agent systems), and fine art analysis. She has supervised over 30 PhD students and pioneered techniques in real-time speech emotion recognition and sleep stage classification.

Labs/Teams: Leads interdisciplinary teams working on neuromorphic sensing, neural network systems, and computational inference of social signals. Active in collaborative projects involving industry and international partners.