Sergey Stavisky, PhD

Prize Winner

Position

Assistant Professor Neurological Surgery

Prize

MIND Prize

Cohort

2023

Program

MIND Prize

Institution

University of California, Davis

Website

neuroprosthetics.science

Project

Next-generation cellular-resolution neural interfaces for restoring human cognitive abilities

Vision

Neurotechnology is poised to profoundly transform human health by bringing together neuroscientific understanding and engineering principles to treat devastating – and currently incurable – neurological injuries and diseases with precise, circuit-level measurements and interventions. Most prior success was at the “outside edges” of the nervous system – restoring sensation (such as cochlear implants) or motor function (such as arm prostheses). These domains benefited from decades of work in animal models. Moving further in towards addressing the complex cognitive dysfunctions that are becoming the largest causes of morbidity in the developed world, such as supporting memory, requires a platform for understanding human-specific neurobiology. My starting point is studying speech: not only is speaking amongst the fastest and most precise human sensorimotor behaviors, but understanding (and restoring) speech also sets the stage for my group to expand into investigating the closely linked cognitive functions of language and declarative memory.

About

Dr. Stavisky is a neuroscientist and neural engineer developing brain-computer interfaces to restore lost brain functions. He received his Sc.B. from Brown University in 2008, after which he worked as a research engineer in the BrainGate group at Brown for two years. He earned his PhD in neurosciences in 2016 at Stanford University, where he studied the motor cortical control of reaching and developed brain-computer interfaces in a preclinical monkey model in Krishna Shenoy’s group. He subsequently pursued postdoctoral training in the Stanford Neural Prosthetics Translational Laboratory, mentored by Jaimie Henderson and Krishna Shenoy. Dr. Stavisky is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Neurological Surgery at the University of California, Davis. He co-directs the UC Davis Neuroprosthetics Lab, which develops neuroprosthetic devices and tests them in first-in human pilot studies. Sergey has been recognized with a number of awards including the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award at the Scientific Interface, Regeneron Prize for Creative Innovation, NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, Searle Scholars, and this MIND Prize.

For me, having impact means that the neurotechnologies I develop move forward beyond the academic research stage and become real medical devices that help patients at scale”.

Precision neuroelectronic medicine has the potential to transform the way we treat brain health. Brain-computer interfaces are already being tested to restore lost movement and speech to people with paralysis; many of the same principles can also be used to build “cognitive neuroprostheses” to sustain and restore complex human abilities including memory. To do this, we need better neural interface devices that are capable of safely recording from and stimulating thousands of individuals neurons in people. This project builds upon recent breakthroughs in silicon probes with integrated electronics – which have revolutionized neuroscience research in animal models – to now develop next-generation neural interfaces for human research. We’ll start by testing this technology in volunteer participants during neurosurgical procedures that already involve placing electrodes in the brain, and to improve the capabilities of speech restoration brain-computer interfaces. This will pave the way for making this platform technology available to the wider research community to study and treat a variety of neurodegenerative diseases and other neurological disorders.

The MIND Prize will allow me to build new devices to study how the human brain works, providing us with the ability to observe roughly 100 times more neurons simultaneously than before.