Research Overview
UNMIL Vision
Your mind is an amorphous sentience riding a three-pound substrate of gelatinous brain. Within that brain, all of your sensations, thoughts, feelings, hopes, and dreams comprise electro-chemical patterns, endlessly reconfiguring themselves to give your mind the experiences of perception, cogitation, emotion, inspiration, and aspiration. Damage to that brain -- whether by physical injury, genetic predisposition, psychological trauma, infectious disease, or the march of time -- alters those electro-chemical, neural patterns. Though we may never understand how the mind creates itself upon the brain substrate, we absolutely know that disturbances to those neural patterns distort the experiences of that brain and may warp the fundamental consciousness of the mind within.
In our lab, we explore the physical nature of those electro-chemical patterns and how the information they convey undergird the mind. We aim to understand how neurological disorders impair native electro-chemical activity and impede brain function. We design, develop, and deploy clinical interventions to restore healthy electro-chemical patterning and rehabilitate information processing with the brain, to revitalize the mind it subserves.
Neural Modulation
Our lab sits at the intersection of basic neuroscience and neuroengineering. Through experimental, clinical, and computational work, we aim to identify differences in neural processing between default and disordered neurological states. We seek to leverage this understanding to develop devices and approaches to modulate neural activity to alleviate symptoms. We work on enhancing existing neuromodulation therapies, and innovating less invasive technologies that nonetheless modulate neural tissue activity in ways that improve the living experience of persons with neurological conditions.
Neural Information
Information in the brain is not a semantic abstraction, but a concrete, measurable, physical entity that gives meaning to the biological tissue through which it flits. We operate on the premise that information is the fundamental currency of neural function, and that the brain must be understood as a substrate for communication thereof. We aim to quantify the fidelity of neural signals in various states to help unravel the mechanisms of neuropathology. From our perspective that many disease conditions are fundamentally failures of neural information processing, restoring that information processing is synonymous with eliminating neurological dysfunction.Multipronged Innovation
We aim to exploit our improving understanding of neural information processing across healthy and disordered states to design the next generation of neuromodulatory interventions. We microfabricate novel stimulating electrode geometries. We optimize temporal and spatial contact patterns for non-invasive electrodes. We record neuronal unit and neural field activity from computer simulations, animal models, and human patients. In those subjects, we test the designs and algorithms of our neuromodulatory interventions. The cross-disciplinary nature of our lab is enhanced by its physical location between the Price College of Engineering and the University of Utah Health Medical Center.
