Engage and Enable Blog

The aim of this blog is to show what’s happening at the Center for Neurotechnology among its faculty, student and staff members. To learn more about the center and its work, visit our Feature Stories page.

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Professor Joel Voldman (center) referees a WrestleBrainia 3000 match.On April 5, dozens of local middle school students stuck electrodes to their arms and observed the power of the electrical signals that travel through their muscles. The activity was part of the Office of Engineering Outreach Programs’ Middle School Mentoring Program, which pairs undergraduate and graduate mentors with middle school students from Boston, Cambridge and Lawrence, Massachusetts.

In a 2013 TED talk, Dr. Andres Lozano, a neurosurgeon from the University of Toronto, talked about his research and work on deep brain stimulation, a technology used to treat Parkinson’s disease, epilepsy and other neurological disorders.

Sara Goering majored in psychology as an undergraduate at the University of Illinois, where she took classes in neuropsychology. She also worked in a learning and memory lab. “It was interesting stuff,” she said. “I liked studying brains, and looking for differences in those brains.” This early work with brains in a lab has come full circle for Goering, who has a PhD in philosophy. It now helps inform her current gig with the Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering (CSNE), a NSF-backed Engineering Research Center (ERC) based at the University of Washington in Seattle. The philosophy professor was tapped to work with the Center based on her work studying disabilities.

On Saturday, November 16, over 60 middle school and college students wielded plungers, bubble wrap and duct tape in a design challenge to construct a functional prosthetic leg. The activity was part of the OEOP Middle School Mentoring Program, which matches undergraduate and graduate mentors with middle school students from Boston, Cambridge and Lawrence, Massachusetts.

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