News about my research or articles where I comment about neuroscience and neurotechnology.
- February 8, 2024. A great long-form story about the experience of several participants in the BrainGate brain-computer interface clinical trial, and the large team effort (including my postdoc and recent work) over the past decade to get neuroprosthetic technology to where it currently is. “Give It Some Thought” (Stanford Magazine, by Sam Scott).
- February 4, 2024. I was quoted in an article, “Behind Elon Musk’s brain chip: Decades of research and lofty ambitions to meld minds with computers” (NBC News, by Denise Chow).
- November 28, 2023. My group’s speech restoration project was featured in an article titled “Giving their voice back” in the Fall 2023 issue of the UC Davis magazine (In Greater Focus Magazine, by Clémentine Sicard).
- November 6, 2023. Quoted in “A man with Parkinson’s regained the ability to walk thanks to a spinal implant” commenting on the recent neuro-restoration paper in Nature Medicine (MIT Technology Review, by Abdullahi Tsanni).
- October 3, 2023. My team won the 2023 International BCI Award for our project “A rapidly-deployable high performance speech neuro-prosthesis”.
- July 6, 2023. Quoted in “Brain-Spine Interface Restores Standing, Walking, and Stair-Climbing After Spinal Cord Injury” commenting on the recent Onward Brain-Spine Interface paper in Nature (Neurology Today, by Dan Hurley).
- May 18, 2023. David Brandman and I spoke to the Connecting ALS podcast about our speech brain-computer interface research:
- May 15, 2023. I was named a 2023 Searle Scholar. This prestigious annual award selects ~15 early career scientists across the biological, chemical, and engineering sciences. It comes with a flexible $300,000 to support my research program.
- April 25, 2023. I was awarded the MIND Prize, a new $750,000 award mechanism for early-to-mid career scientists using innovative approaches to treat neurodegenerative diseases. The lab also was awarded a $2M Pilot Clinical Trial Award from the DOD Congressionally Directed Medical Research program in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis to develop a system that restores lost speech by synthesizing the user’s voice using a brain-computer interface (UC Davis Health News, by Claudia Coons).
- February 16, 2023. Quoted in “Two Studies Find Few Brain-Computer Interface-related Adverse Events” commenting on the recent Synchron Stentrode safety paper (Neurology Today, by Dan Hurley).
- January 18, 2023. Quoted in “Brain Implant Helps Patients with ALS Paralysis Use Computers” commenting on the recent Synchron Stentrode safety paper (Medscape Medical News, by Eve Bender).
- August 18, 2022. Related to the news that our group became a site of the BrainGate2 pilot clinical trial and is recruiting participants, David Brandman and I did a long interview on the Davisville podcast. I really like this program; over the course of ~28 minutes, we cover our speech BCI goals as well as how each of us got into this field and why we chose to launch our independent careers at UC Davis.
- April 4, 2022. My work on studying speech production and bringing next-gen neural interfaces to human use were featured in this very good write-up by Emily Singer for the Simons Foundation. “Cracking the Neural Code in Humans”.
- March 21, 2022. Q&A with me as part of the “Next Generation Science” series (Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, Nicholas Weiler and Gordy Slack).
- December 17, 2020. Quoted in “Implanted Endovascular Device Provides ALS Patients With Independent Access to Computer Navigation” (Neurology Today, by Dan Hurley).
- October 28, 2020. I discuss brain-computer interfaces for communication with Matt Angle, Beata Jarosiewicz, Vikash Gilja, and Frank Willett in this episode of the Neurotech Pub Podcast.
- September 30, 2020. I spoke at the SynBioBeta 2020 panel on “Neuromodulation and the frontiers of biolectronic therapy”. The other panelists are Nir Grossman, Flip Sabes, David Borton, Konstantinos Alataris, and moderated by Ursheet Parikh. [link]
- August 29, 2020. Quoted in “Three Little Pigs’: Musk’s Neuralink Puts Computer Chips in Animal” (New York Times, by Reuters).
- August 3, 2020. “How thoughts could one day control electronic prostheses, wirelessly” (Stanford Medicine Scope Blog, by Tom Abate).
- July 14, 2020. “Discoveries of Rotational Dynamics Add to Puzzle of Neural Computation” (Simons Foundation, by Ashley Juavinett).
- July 1, 2019. “How Important Is Spike Sorting?” (Simons Foundation, by Grace Lindsay).
- June 20, 2019. “Could prosthetic limbs one day be controlled by human thought?” (Stanford Engineering, by Andrew Myers).
- December 10, 2019. “Speech Decoded from Brain Activity in Area for Hand Control” (The Scientist, by Shawna Williams).
- December 10, 2019. “How to “Read” the Brain Signals Underlying Human Speech” (HHMI News, by Meghan Rosen).
- December 10, 2019. “Why we talk with our hands — and how that may help give speech to the speechless” (Stanford Medicine Scope Blog, by Bruce Goldman).
- December 10, 2019. “Brain patterns can predict speech of words and syllables” (Elife, by Emily Packer).
- February 15, 2018. “Mental rehearsal prepares our minds for real-world action, Stanford researchers find” (Stanford News, by Nathan Collins).
- February 15, 2018. “Study Explores How To Master A Skill You’ve Only Practiced In Your Mind” (Forbes, by Andrea Morris).
- January 24, 2018. “People with tetraplegia gain rapid use of brain-computer interface” (Brown News, by Kevin Stacey).
- June 15, 2017. “Did something jostle my arm? My neurons need a moment” (Stanford Engineering, by Glen Martin).
- December 8, 2015. “We Have the Technology: How Biohackers, Foodies, Physicians, and Scientists Are Transforming Human Perception, One Sense at a Time” (book by Kara Platoni, published by Basic Books).
- May 20, 2013. “Neural Prosthetics: Understanding Reach Planning”. (NSF IGERT Video and Poster Competition, Public Choice and Community Choice winners).