Collaborative Meetings

Our objective is to bring people from different disciplines to share their work, which is followed by a multidisciplinary brainstorming session

An Informal Gathering of Clinicians and Researchers

Presentations (~7ish minutes per person)


  1. Lora Kahn, M.D., a fellowship-trained stereotactic and functional neurosurgeon, was inspired to become a neurosurgeon while studying cognitive neuroscience and psychiatric disease under Nobel Laureate Dr. Eric Kandel. During residency, she developed special interests in deep brain stimulation (DBS) therapy for Parkinson’s disease, essential tremor, dystonia and obsessive-compulsive disorder, together with surgical treatments for epilepsy. Her research interests include optimization of imaging studies in minimally invasive epilepsy surgeries and safe application of neuromodulation for treatment of debilitating psychiatric disease. She will speak about surgery for epilepsy

  2. Korak Sarkar, M.D. is a board-certified neurologist who completed sub-specialty training at Northwestern and Shirley Ability Institute (formerly the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago) in Brain Injury Medicine. He has served as an Innovation Fellow at Northwestern’s Center for Device Development. He has been very active in research throughout his career and was awarded the American Academy of Neurology’s (AAN) Founder's Award in Translational Research. He participates in the AAN's policy and advocacy efforts, and serves as a member of its Health Policy subcommittee. He is currently an attending physician in the Department of Neurology at Ochsner Health and a staff physician in the Department of PM&R in the New Orleans Veterans Affairs Medical Center. He serves as a clinical liaison for innovation Ochsner as well as the director of Ochsner’s Neurosciences Medical 3D (M3D) Lab, which applies advanced manufacturing, virtual and augmented reality to healthcare delivery. He will be discussing the use of advanced visualization in neurological diseases.

  3. Avijit Bakshi, PhD is a research scientist in the Ashton Graybiel Spatial Orientation Lab. He will talk about his research and the models he develops to characterize human postural balancing. In the past he has studied postural balancing in novel force environments. He will finish by talking about how finger stabilization can help enhance balance control.

  4. Vivekanand Pandey Vimal, PhD is a research scientist in the Ashton Graybiel Spatial Orientation Lab at Brandeis University. He will talk about his research in balance where participants cannot use gravitational cues and as a result become spatially disoriented. While his research is focused towards spaceflight, it has relevance for studying patients with balance disorders especially those with damaged vestibular systems. At the end, he will briefly talk about his future directions in human augmentation.


General Q&A and Brainstorming (~20 mins)

  • What are some collaborative ideas that could bring together what each speaker presented?

Spinning: Perspective from Pole Dance and Research

Human Augmentation Party

Main Objectives of Event (Held on Saturday August 31 2019):

  • Science is becoming too esoteric and removed from the daily dreams of Human Destiny. We need to break the aseptic view of science and let it freely mix into our collective consciousness and creativity.

    • I have been exploring how to engage the public to explore the underlying philosophical questions about the role of technology in Human Destiny and Identity. I do this, possibly novel, type of scientific outreach by first having traditional presentations (Reality), followed by artistic brainstorming that mixes scholars with the public (Digestion), followed by a ceremony (Mythology). The purpose of the ceremony is help write these ideas into the collective narrative of the group. The ceremony is also ridiculous and fun which makes it more memorable and it uses ideas that were generated in the Digestion phase. I explain this in a short talk that I gave at this party.

  • A final objective is to explore some questions such as: What is the Human Journey? What is the Human Identity, especially as we are pregnant with the next Era of Humanity, that of Technology? What is Human Destiny?

  • To learn more about this event, go to Vivekanand Pandey Vimal's website.