Daniel Gonzales, assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Vanderbilt University, has received two prestigious grants—including an R21 from the National Institutes of Health to support early-stage, exploratory research—that will be used to improve the performance of brain-computer interfaces.
Gonzales and his team at his Vanderbilt lab specialize in combining microfabricated, transparent brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) with optical neurotechnologies for recording activity across massive spatial scales, from individual synapses up to brain-wide networks. BCIs enable patients with severe neurological disorders to operate devices, such as computers, and communicate more effectively.
With the $450,000 award from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research’s Young Investigator Program, BCIs will be used to study fundamental properties about information generation and processing in the brain, with implications in artificial intelligence, robotics, and neuroscience, Gonzales said. The NIH R21 ($394,915) will explore methods to improve and enhance BCI control.
“We hypothesize that by stimulating specific neural pathways, we can improve BCI performance,” said Gonzales, who is assistant professor at the Vanderbilt Brain Institute. “This may provide a path to enhance and augment human BCIs in the future.”