David Borton, PhD, assistant professor of engineering, Brown University, has been awarded the Director’s Fellowship by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Borton was one of four faculty members who won Young Faculty awards in 2015; the Director’s Fellowship provides a third year of funding of up to $500,000 to recipients who demonstrated exceptional performance over their first two years.
Borton’s lab focuses on neural engineering techniques that aim to develop prosthetic limbs that provide sensory feedback to the nervous system.
“The only feedback that people get from their prosthetic legs is from the stump, which is where the end of the body meets the start of the prosthetic limb,” Borton told the Brown Daily Herald. “Learning about how nerves recognize where the limb is and what the limb is doing is especially important for people with lower-limb loss because when you have a prosthetic leg, you don’t know where it is in space, and you have a tendency to fall more often.”
In the two years of research funded by the Young Faculty Award, Borton’s lab has successfully developed computational models necessary to recreate sensory feedback from the limbs as well as a system that can transfer this information to the spinal cord through electrical stimulation. With the extra year of funding, Borton hopes to divert his attention from the spinal cord to the brain.
Editor’s note: This story was adapted from materials provided by Brown University.
