Several BRL students, including Jeffery Herron, Tim Brown, and summer high school student Hannah Werbel, are featured in this video overview of CSNE. Enjoy!
Month: April 2015
CSNE Interviews BRL Student Katherine Pratt to Discuss Neural Engineering
Katherine was featured in an article by CSNE about her research! She discusses her research in EMG-controlled virtual cursors, why she chose electrical engineering, and what inspires her in her work. Read it here.
UW Today Article Features BRL Research into Deep Brain Stimulation
The UW Today website posted an article today that covers our ongoing work into researching closed-loop and volitional deep brain stimulation (DBS) techniques. In particular it describes our usage of the Medtronic Activa PC+S Deep Brain Stimulator as a research platform for use with Essential Tremor patients. Check out the full article here
Tony Dyson, the designer of R2-D2, tours the BioRobotics Lab
This week the BRL hosted Tony Dyson by giving him a lab tour! Tony Dyson, who built R2-D2, is in town for the We-Robot 2015 Conference on Robotics, Law & Policy. Tonight he will be interviewed by Ryan Calo as the conference’s keynote talk. He was also recently interviewed by Geekwire which can be read here-
BRL Contributes two papers to We Robot 2015
We Robot posted the papers to be discussed next week at upcoming conference at the University of Washington. The conference deals with various ethical and legal issues surrounding near-future technologies. The BioRobotics lab contributed two papers to the conference that refer to our ongoing work in teleoperation security and closed-loop DBS systems. We are really looking forward to seeing what discussions these papers generate!
Feel free to read the papers or watch the panel discussions from the conference which have been published online at the below links-
BRL Students Receive NSF GRFP and NDSEG Fellowships!
We’ve received great news for three BioRobotics lab affiliated students who each received a new fellowship this week! Two students, EE graduate student Katherine Pratt and undergrad alum Andrew Hill, each received a NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Margaret Thompson, an EE graduate student, received the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship. Congratulations to all three of them!
Current BRL graduate student Margaret Thompson graduated in 2014 from Harvey Mudd College with a degree in engineering. Her current work with Professor Chizeck in the BioRobotics Lab is designing novel brain-computer interface (BCI) platforms using long-term, fully implanted deep brain stimulation (DBS) electrodes which were originally designed to treat movement disorders such as Parkinson’s disease and essential tremor. Read more about her work here.
Katherine Pratt graduated in 2008 from MIT with a degree in aerospace engineering. She worked at Blue Origin in systems engineering prior to entering active duty as an officer in the US Air Force. Most of her service was spent at Edwards AFB as a member of the operational test team for the F-35; she concentrated on pilot systems and cockpit integration. After leaving the military, she worked with Adrian KC Lee at UW (LABS^N), running spatio-temporal behavioral, EEG, and M/EEG experiments. For the past academic year she has been a participant in the NSF Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering’s program that facilitates veterans returning to academia. Her current work with Professor Chizeck is in the BioRobotics Lab is developing touchscreen control using EMG and other neural signals for individuals without sufficient finger dexterity to operate smart phones, tablets and similar devices.
Andrew Hill is a UW Bioengineering undergraduate alumni. He worked in the Biorobotics Lab from 2010 to 2012, where he did a year long senior capstone design project under the supervision of Professors Chizeck and Hannaford. After graduating in 2012, he then worked as an engineer at Tekscan, Inc. for one year followed by another year as a genomics researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital/Broad Institute in Boston, returning to UW in 2014 as a graduate student in Genome Sciences.
Read more about the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program here.