My name is Ehsan, pronounced as /eh sa:n/ in IPA and written as احسان in Persian/Farsi. It’s often mispronounced as [i:za:n] and misspelled as Eshan. Think of it as ’eh + sun,’ with the emphasis on ‘sun,’ so I’m sometimes called ‘Ehsun’ for a sunnier pronunciation :) Ehsan means “benefaction” in Persian, meaning “to do beautiful things.” My last name, Eqlimi, is pronounced /eqliːˈmiː/ or /eɣliːˈmiː/, written as اقلیمی. The ‘q’ sound is like ‘r’ in French or ‘gh/غ’ in Arabic, and in modern Persian, it’s closer to /ɣ/ than /q/. Like my first name, associated with the sun, my last name, Eqlimi, relates to weather or climate. “اقلیم” (Eqlim) in Persian is derived from the Greek “κλίμα” (klima), meaning “climate” or “region”.
I was born and raised in Tehran, Iran, and lived in Ardebil, Tabriz, and again Tehran before moving to Ghent, Belgium, in 2017. Previously, I worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the BEAMS group at Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), in Brussels, Belgium. Prior to that, I was postdoc in the the WAVES-Acoustic group at Ghent University (Ugent)-imec, Ghent, Belgium. Before my postdoctoral positions, I was a PhD researcher in biomedical engineering at Ghent University-imec’s Waves Group in Belgium and defended my PhD in 2022. Prior to that, I pursued a PhD in biomedical engineering in the department of medical physics and biomedical engineering at Tehran University of Medical Sciences, although I eventually dropped out. I completed two years of the PhD course and successfully passed the comprehensive exam. Before that, I worked as an “Image Processing Scientist” at Sciences Green (علوم سبز) and Matiran (متیران) in Tehran.
When I’m not analyzing brain signals/images, I’m either reading philosophy or reading theoretical physics and mathematics. But I always have music playing in the background. This is the playlist I listened to during my PhD at UGent: Something is dancing in my brain and these are the playlists I’ve created since completing my PhD: Mr.Fox and Under shower with open eyes.