What is the focus of the ISN lab and current research being pursued?

Cauwenberghs: “Our research is at the crossroads of silicon and biology. One way or another we are all taking advantage of the unique properties of silicon to then interface with living tissue, or more generally understand how the brain works. We use silicon integrated circuits in two ways: (1) we gain inspiration from biology in developing access memory). CMOS technology is commonly used within integrated and digital logic circuits found everywhere from smart phones and laptops to hearing aids and pacemakers. RRAM is a novel type of nonvolatile memory storage that utilizes the dielectric properties of the materials. For each synaptic operation, the system only requires several Femtojoules of energy; this unprecedented gain in efficiency brings the team one step closer to the goal of developing systems that rival the brain’s low-power computational abilities. This was made possible because the system holds the advantage of dual function: the synapses within the chip are capable of both memory storage and processing, preventing the necessity of a “middleman”.

How does the ISN lab promote the intellectual growth of its students?

Cauwenberghs: “When our students graduate, they become our future leaders. We’ve had some who are now faculty elsewhere in the country or the world, some go into industry, and some even start companies, like Cognionics. We also have our students interning in companies and taking leadership and pushing technology there. They are taking what we do here and applying it to the marketplace.”

“I was naturally attracted to bioengineering. It’s been great working with students.” While the members work on highly technical and diverging projects, all agree that they have enjoyed their time in the ISN lab and are inspired by their Principal Investigator’s ingenuity and inclusiveness.

PhD student Andrew Perley collaborates with Dr. Todd Coleman on gastric electrophysiology. He aims to utilize surface electrodes on the stomach to diagnose diseases, as well as create new signal processing techniques to better extract the information at the gastric level. Perley says, “We’re trying to explore the gut-brain connection in electrophysiology; the gut is often referred to as the second brain because of how densely it is aligned with neurons. It is thought to be very closely related to understanding things like mood, anxiety, and depression, but also physical indicators of health. There’s this rich area of both neuroscience and clinical applications along the gut-brain axis. We could maybe take advantage of these feedback loops through noninvasive stimulation of the vagus nerve, which connects the brain to many other autonomic-functioning organs.”

IBM Fellow and postdoc Dr. Bruno Pedroni earned his PhD in the ISN lab. He explains, “Gert has given us all the freedom to explore a vast number of fields. In the last year I’ve learned so much dealing with the highest technology of FPGAs (a type of programmable semiconductor device) and so I was able to learn things from a state-of-the-art perspective. I think this combination that Gert has with both government and industry projects is very good.” Currently, Dr.Pedroni is working on a team to build a large-scale neuromorphic system of 32 FPGA boards, which they plan to contain 128 million neurons running in real time. Describing Dr. Pedroni’s work, Dr. Cauwenberghs explains, “This is about building an infrastructure for the larger community to have neuromorphic engineering tools available at one’s fingertips, as opposed to the very high barriers that exist for entering. The neuromorphic engineering community is very small; we want to increase the subscription.”

Postdoc Dr. Yuchen Xu, who earned a PhD in nanoengineering focusing on cochlear implants, now focuses on in-ear diagnostics: “We are trying to develop a platform that can both function as an electroencephalogram (EEG) as well as adding more chemical sensing modalities, which I think many companies will be interested in.”

Dr. Frederic Broccard, a project scientist and faculty at the Institute of Neural Computation focuses on neuromorphic engineering: “I was trained as a neuroscientist; although there are few people coming in with wet lab experience, it is a very nice environment for collaboration, so I fell right in place since the beginning. Thanks to Gert there’s more interest in the department and across departments in neural engineering; all the different aspects in the field can be tapped into by different labs with help from Gert. There’s so many projects in the lab and always something new to do. For example, we have a chip that was made in the lab 10 years ago and is still running, so we are trying new things with the chip and in the meantime, developing a vast array of devices for different levels of biological organization. I think that’s what people like about the lab: we can work at various levels of the nervous system.”

How do you see the future of bioengineering taking shape?

Cauwenberghs: “In addition to modeling how the brain works, which is going to be a difficult task for a long time to come, the premise of our work is then to also benefit healthcare by coming up with new biofeedback strategies that embrace the mind-brain-body, using unobtrusive technologies and minimally invasive strategies. We hope these interfaces can better drive the body’s natural propensity towards healing itself; there’s plenty of feedback loops in the body, so having means to come in and doing it in such a way as to remediate some kind of disorder is a different paradigm; so we are looking at more gently intervening methods of promoting health.”

“We have this international crisis now: the cost and availability of healthcare is a major challenge. At the same time, we have new opportunities in technologies that can take things out of the hands of caretakers within the centralized hospital framework and into those of the user. We see a future with less acute measures, and more preventative, long-term care that drives the plasticity of the brain.”

“The technology should not harm the body, I cannot overemphasize that. Yes, deep brain stimulation may be remediating some symptoms of Parkinson’s, but there are huge side effects. Rather than replacing function, we seek to enhance function. We still need hospitals, but for most of our ailments, we should have chronic monitoring. Many of the diseases that are very hard to solve from a pharmaceutical or surgical standpoint are neurodegenerative in nature; you really need to look at the neural circuit, rather than purely the anatomy or the chemical pathways.”

How has the lab and larger bioengineering community been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic?

Cauwenberghs: “COVID-19 has affected all of us, and it’s really unfortunate that so many had to die. On the upside, hopefully we learn from it and are better prepared in the future. The key here is that there will be other viruses, and I hope there will be some greater bioengineering tools that can be more swift for detection and empower the immune system to fend off disease.”

“Of course it’s hard, but we’re all connected [and] there’s something missing when you don’t have the actual classroom or lab, but we can still see each other and make it work. Now some people hate Zoom, but I think it’s not too bad. Zoom has in a way kept us together, like we have our weekly lab meetings and also meet more often. There is one benefit; we have all these conferences and meetings to go to, so we would literally hop on a plane, go to D.C. and have a 15 minute presentation, and then hop on a plane back. Now those meetings are online, which makes sense as we can communicate more effectively; we don’t have to do all this long-distance traveling which can be really straining.”

Pandemic or not, one thing is clear: the ISN lab is committed to improving human health through technologies that draw from the talents of many forward-thinking researchers in neuroengineering.