Banu Onaral

Banu Onaral (June 15, 1949 – December 17, 2024) was a Turkish academic who was the H.H. Sun Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Electrical Engineering at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

In 1997, she founded Drexel University's School of Biomedical Engineering Science and Health Systems.

Education For her secondary education, Onaral had attended the Notre Dame de Sion French Girls' High School in Istanbul, Turkey. Onaral earned a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 1978, and a BSEE and MSEE in Electrical Engineering from Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, Turkey in 1973 and 1974, respectively. Academic and research career Onaral joined the faculty of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Biomedical Engineering and Science Institute in 1981. She held two sabbatical leaves at Boğaziçi University in the academic years 1980–1981 and 1987–1988.

From 1997, she served as the founding director of the School of Biomedical Engineering Science and Health Systems.

Her academic focus in both research and teaching was centered on information engineering with special emphasis on complex systems and biomedical signal processing in ultrasound and optics. She led major research and development projects sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF), National Institutes of Health (NIH), Office of Naval Research (ONR), DARPA and Department of Homeland Security (DHS). She supervised a large number of graduate students to degree completion and had an extensive publication record in biomedical signals and systems. She was the recipient of a number of faculty excellence awards including the 1990 Lindback Distinguished Teaching Award of Drexel University, the EDUCOM Best Educational Software Award and the NSF Faculty Achievement Award.