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On Friday, July 29, scientists from the Washington National Primate Research Center (WaNPRC) participated in “Collaborations to Understand Research and Ethics (CURE),” a professional development program designed for science teachers. The program was developed by the Northwest Association for Biomedical Research (NWABR) and funded by a Science Education Partnership Award grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

 

Eberhard Fetz, WaNPRC core staff scientist, and Chet Moritz, WaNPRC affiliate scientist, will contribute expertise to a new Engineering Research Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering (CSNE) based at the University of Washington (UW). The CSNE, which launches this month in UW Russell Hall, is funded by an $18.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation.

“The center will work on robotic devices that interact with, assist and understand the nervous system,” said director Yoky Matsuoka, a UW associate professor of computer science and engineering. “It will combine advances in robotics, neuroscience, electromechanical devices and computer science to restore or augment the body’s ability for sensation and movement.”

Fetz, a UW professor of physiology and biophysics, and Moritz, a UW professor of rehabilitation medicine, will contribute research on restoring movement to paralyzed limbs using tiny, battery-powered implantable brain-computer interfaces called neurochips. The two researchers and their colleagues have successfully deployed the devices in nonhuman primates.

“The neurochip can be used to bridge lost connections and can also strengthen neural connections by delivering stimulation synchronized with neural activity,” Fetz said. “It operates autonomously during free movements, allowing the adaptive brain to incorporate the artificial recurrent loop into normal behavior and provides ample time to create neural plasticity.”

The neurochip resulted from a productive collaboration between a neuroscientist, Andrew Jackson, and electrical engineering student Jaideep Mavoori. “The new center will provide many new opportunities for such innovative interdepartmental collaborations,” Fetz said.

Partners are the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and San Diego State University. Also partnering are historically minority-serving institutions Spelman College and Morehouse College, both in Atlanta, and Southwestern College in Chula Vista, Calif. International partners are the University of British Columbia and the University of Tokyo.

For more information, read the UW news release.

Eb Fetz, WaNPRC core staff scientist, and colleagues for received a $1 million grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation for a project titled “Implantable Computers to Augment Brain Function.”

Fetz is collaborating Professors Jeffrey Ojemann (Neurological Surgery), Brian Otis (Electrical Engineering) and Babak Parviz (Electrical Engineering) on a project to develop and deploy recurrent brain-computer interfaces (R-BCIs). These R-BCIs have numerous clinical applications for bridging damaged biological pathways and for strengthening weak neural connections.

For more information, read the UW news release.

Following a successful surgery on Oct. 21, a patient at the UW Medical Center became the world’s first recipient of a device that aims to quell the disabling vertigo associated with Meniere’s disease. The device being tested — a cochlear implant and processor with re-engineered software and electrode arrays — represents four-plus years of work by Jay T. Rubinstein and James O. Phillips, both of whom are WaNPRC affiliate scientists.

Shiu-Lok Hu, WaNPRC core staff scientist, is part of a research team that received a five-year, $15.5 million grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) under the HIV Vaccine Research and Design (HIVRAD) program.

The Center is poised to add new BSL-3 facilities to our to our laboratory inventory. The addition of this facility has doubled our previous BSL-3 laboratory capacity. The new laboratory was carefully designed to accommodate and safely support several investigators’ research interests simultaneously.

When Lauren Jorelle was a UW student, she went to Indonesia as part of a field study program sponsored by the Washington National Primate Research Center (WaNPRC) and the UW Department of Psychology. The experience was a good one — so good that she elected to go back on her own to do further research through the Indonesian university the UW collaborates with.