A CNT Monthly Newsletter

November 2022

HONORS AND AWARDS

Congratulations to CNT members Azadeh Yazdan-Shahmorad and Eric Shea-Brown who are part of a new National Institutes of Health RO1 grant titled "Explainable Machine Learning to Guide Prefrontal Brain Stimulation."
Congratulations to CNT co-director Rajesh Rao and Azadeh Yazdan-Shahmorad for the recent award of their National Science Foundation grant titled "Optical Neural Co-Processors for Predictive and Adaptive Brain Restoration and Augmentation."
Samantha Sun won the best student paper from IEEE Brain and was runner-up for best paper at the IEEE SMC conference last month in Prague, Czech Republic. Her paper was titled "Human intracortical responses to varying electrical stimulation conditions are separable in low-dimensional subspaces" and was co-authored by Lila Levinson, Courtnie Paschall, Jeffrey Herron, Kurt Weaver, Jason Hauptman, Andrew Ko, Jeffrey Ojemann, and Rajesh Rao.

UPCOMING EVENTS

Abstract photograph of people speaking to each other at a conference poster session.

CNT members Jeff Herron, Amy Orsborn and Azadeh Yazdan-Shahmorad are speakers at the 2022 IEEE Brain Discovery Neurotechnology Workshop – Brain, Mind, and Body Symposium, November 10-11, 2022, San Diego, CA.
World Congress on Undergraduate Research, April 4-6, 2023, Coventry, UK.
British Conference of Undergraduate Research, April 5-6, 2023, Coventry, UK.
11th International IEEE EMBS Conference on Neural Engineering, April 25-27, 2023, Baltimore, MD.
Spinal Cord Injury and Repair: From Mechanisms to Translation, July 9-14, 2023, Lucca, Italy.

CNT IN THE NEWS

Student holding computer device (top) and abstract of people at a poster session.

Applications for the summer 2023 CNT Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program are now being accepted. This 10-week program provides undergraduate students with opportunities to work on research projects with scientists and to take part in workshop training sessions in ethics, communications, and scientific presentation skills. The program will start on June 13, 2023 and end on August 18, 2023. Completed applications are due on January 15, 2023.

Electrodes on the back of the neck of a person sitting in a chair.

The Up-LIFT study, which was funded by the CNT during its early development, has achieved its primary endpoint of statistically significant and clinically meaningful improvement in upper extremity strength and function.

NEW CNT PUBLICATIONS

Griggs, D.J., Bloch, J., Fisher, S., Ojemann, W.K.S., Coubrough, K.M., Khateeb, K., Chu, M. and Yazdan-Shahmorad, A., Demonstration of an optimized large-scale optogenetic cortical interface for non-human primates, 2022 44th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine & Biology Society (EMBC), 2022, pp. 3081-3084, doi: 10.1109/EMBC48229.2022.9871332.