Carnegie Mellon University will award the sixth annual Carnegie Prize in Mind and Brain Sciences to Dr. Krishna Shenoy. The prize, given by the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (CNBC) and funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York as part of its centennial celebration, recognizes trailblazers in the mind and brain sciences whose research has helped advance the field and its applications.

“Brain-machine Interfaces: From basic science and engineering to clinical trials”
4:30 pm
Thursday, October 18, 2018
Carnegie Mellon University
Simmons Auditorium A – Tepper Building, CMU

ABSTRACT
Millions of people worldwide suffer from neurological disease and injury leading to paralysis, which is often so severe that people are unable to feed themselves or communicate. Cortically-controlled brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) aim to restore some of this lost function by converting neural activity from the brain into control signals for prosthetic devices. I will describe some of our group’s recent investigations into basic motor neurophysiology focused on understanding neural population dynamics, pre-clinical BMIs focused on high-performance control algorithm design, and translational BMI development and pilot clinical trial results focused on helping establish clinical viability.

BIO
Krishna V. Shenoy, PhD, is the Hong Seh and Vivian W. M. Lim Professor of Engineering. He is with the Departments of Electrical Engineering and by courtesy, Bioengineering and Neurobiology at Stanford University. He is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. Prof. Shenoy holds a BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering from UC Irvine (1987-1990), a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT (1990-1995), was a postdoctoral fellow in Neurobiology at Caltech (1995-2001), and has been on faculty at Stanford since then (Assistant Prof. 2001-2008, Associate Prof. 2008-2012, Full Prof. 2012-2017, Endowed Chair 2017 to present). Prof. Shenoy directs the Stanford Neural Prosthetic Systems Lab (basic neuroscience and engineering) and co-directs the Stanford Neural Prosthetics Translational Laboratory (clinical trials), which aim to help restore lost motor function to people with paralysis. Honors and awards include a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award in the Biomedical Sciences, a Sloan Fellow, a McKnight Technological Innovations in Neurosciences Award, an NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, the 2010 Stanford University Postdoc Mentoring Award, and he was elected a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) College of Fellows. Prof. Shenoy serves on the Scientific Advisory Boards of The University of Washington’s Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering (a National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center), CTRL-Labs Inc., MIND-X Inc., Inscopix Inc. and Heal Inc. He is also a consultant for Neuralink Corp.