Kwabena Boahen, PhD, associate professor of bioengineering at Stanford University School of Medicine, California, received a Transformative Research Project award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). There are 79 winners nationwide who will be receiving a total of $143.8 million for proposals that were singled out for being innovative and risk-taking.
Boahen and co-investigator Krishna Shenoy, PhD, associate professor of electrical engineering and associate professor (by courtesy) of neurobiology, Stanford University School of Medicine, and director of the Stanford University Neural Prosthetic Systems Lab (NPSL), will use the funds to work on bringing brain-machine interfaces closer to the clinic by leveraging recent advances in systems neuroscience and neuromorphic engineering. Their work could lead to a chip implanted in the brain that translates signals recorded by microelectrodes into control signals for a robotic arm.