Alan Mardinly | Towards High Bandwidth Biohybrid Neural Interfaces
Foresight Institute’s Neurotech Group
Towards High Bandwidth Biohybrid Neural Interfaces
Abstract: Neural interfaces that record directly from neurons offer high performance, but their channel count is limited by tissue damage from invasive neural probes. We seek to break the channel count limitations of conventional intracortical BCIs by engineering neurons to interface with electrodes in the laboratory, and allowing the neurons to integrate into neural circuits. The engineered neurons become an interface layer that lifts representations from the brain to a biological access layer with which we have formed a stable interface. In this talk, I will review the theoretical basis and brief history of these class of interfaces, and share Science corporation's latest technical progress towards making them a reality.
Bio: Dr. Alan Mardinly is Chief Scientific Officer at Science Corp., and is a cofounder of the company. He leads Science’s biohybrid project. His focus is on optogenetic therapies for vision restoration and biohybrid brain implants.
Alan has more than 15 years of experience in neuroscience research, working across biology and neuroscience from stem cells to brain implants. He received his BA in Biology from the University of Chicago in 2006 and his PhD in neurobiology from Harvard University in 2013, where he studied how experience-induced transcriptional programs control synaptic plasticity in inhibitory neurons. Alan then went to UC Berkeley where he developed holographic optogenetic approaches to stimulate the brain with spatial and temporal precision. In 2019 he joined the leadership team at Neuralink before eventually departing in 2021 when he left to co-found Science.
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=zWyXnKcAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao
Foresight Institute’s Neurotech Group
A group of neuroscience researchers, entrepreneurs, and allies advancing beneficial short-term and long-term neurotechnology applications.
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