Article by Wayne Gillam / UW ECE News
Amy Orsborn, a Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor in Electrical & Computer Engineering and Bioengineering at the UW, was recently named a recipient of a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award, one of the most prestigious awards in the nation for early-career faculty. Photo by Ryan Hoover / UW ECE
Amy Orsborn, a Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor in Electrical & Computer Engineering and Bioengineering at the UW, was recently named a recipient of a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award, one of the most prestigious awards in the nation for early-career faculty. The award will support Orsborn’s research investigating how the brain and nervous system respond to using sensorimotor neural interfaces, which show promise for treating a wide range of neurological disorders and conditions, such as paralysis caused by spinal cord injury or stroke. The grant also supports educational initiatives that will benefit underrepresented students in STEM.
Orsborn’s work will help to lay a foundation for creating advanced computer algorithms in sensorimotor neural interfaces that can better adapt to the user. Her research is inspired by a fundamental challenge in neural engineering, where neural interfaces engage with the brain and nervous system in what is called a “closed loop” — the user influences the device while operating it, but the device also influences the user. This closed loop creates dynamic, ever-changing interactions between the brain, nervous system, and the device that can impact the user’s ability to control the neural interface as well as its therapeutic potential.
“Most of the existing tools that we have to design neural interfaces today ignore this interplay between the user and the device,” Orsborn said. “The goal of our research will be to build new, computational frameworks for studying these inherent interactions, so we can design our interfaces in a smarter way.”
The NSF selects award recipients who are faculty members at the beginning of their careers to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization. The intent of the NSF CAREER program is to provide stable support, enabling awardees to develop not only as outstanding researchers but also as educators demonstrating commitment to teaching, learning and dissemination of knowledge. The award spans five years, and it will enable Orsborn and her research team to advance foundational knowledge for neural engineers working at the intersection of neuroscience and device development.
Engineering a smarter neural interface
The research funded by this award is building off earlier, collaborative work Orsborn has done with UW ECE Associate Professor Sam Burden. In this NSF-funded research, Orsborn will be applying mathematical techniques Burden developed using control theory, which are relevant to modeling feedback interactions between a sensorimotor neural interface and its user. With these techniques, Orsborn plans to identify principles that explain how a user learns to control a closed-loop neural interface and then apply those insights to methods for computation that takes place inside the device.
“This idea of taking control theory-based methods and applying them to neural interfaces to study the sensorimotor system spans many different areas of expertise,” Orsborn said. “It’s really exciting to have a fantastic colleague like Sam, who is interested in this research and translating his work to new applications and new questions.”
Orsborn and her team in the aoLab will conduct experiments using two different types of neural interfaces: muscle/nervous system interfaces applied to humans on the surface of the skin and brain-computer interfaces applied to the sensorimotor cortex of non-human primates. By comparing results from these two different types of neural interfaces, the team aims to better understand computations performed by the brain and nervous system while the user learns to control a neural interface as well as how the device itself might influence those computations.
Orsborn’s research is inspired by a fundamental challenge in neural engineering, where neural interfaces engage with the brain and nervous system in what is called a “closed loop” — the user influences the device while operating it, but the device also influences the user.
The primary goal of this research is to contribute to developing assistive devices and therapeutic neural interfaces for people who have neurological injuries or impairments. However, Orsborn said that this work also might enable scientists and engineers to design technological interfaces that work better for everyone, no matter their health condition. For example, a deeper understanding of the interactions between a user and a neural interface could be applicable to engineering almost any technology that includes human-computer interaction, such as computer screens activated by touch, virtual reality headsets tracking eye movements, or smartphones that can recognize speech patterns. Over the long term, the principles discovered, and mathematical algorithms developed as a result of this research could underpin computation taking place in a vast array of devices, ensuring that these technologies work well and can adapt to any person.
“The biggest takeaway is the importance of that dynamic interaction between the brain, the nervous system and the neural interface,” Orsborn said. “By more fully understanding the complexities of that interaction, we’ll be better able to engineer these devices.”
Educational outreach
Education and outreach are also an important part of the work supported by the award. Orsborn will be partnering with A Vision for Literacy & Access, or AVELA, to develop neural engineering lessons for secondary school students in the Seattle area. AVELA is a recognized student organization at the UW that creates and teaches original STEM-content courses to K–14 youth from underrepresented minority groups. After these lessons have been implemented in local classrooms, Orsborn plans to work with AVELA to develop ways to extend the outreach effort.
“We’re going to work with our local graduate students in AVELA to develop and offer these lessons. Then, we plan to work with grad students at a different university to help them modify and customize the lessons for their local communities,” Orsborn said. “The overarching idea is that this could become a scalable model for how our neural engineering lesson plans and outreach could go far beyond the University of Washington.”
To do this, Orsborn anticipates partnering with Women in Neural Engineering, or WINE, which is a network of neural engineers co-founded by Orsborn. WINE provides vital peer-to-peer mentorship and networking opportunities for women in neural engineering. The group has members at universities across the country, including the University of Colorado, which has a graduate student organization that is part of WINE and plans to help translate these neural engineering lessons for students in their local area.
Orsborn said that she was looking forward to working with AVELA and WINE on curriculum development and distribution, and she noted the value these organizations would bring.
“Neural engineering is a really interesting field that benefits from interdisciplinary approaches and many different perspectives,” Orsborn said. “If we want to build therapies that work well and meet the needs of diverse communities, then we need diverse contributions.”
More information about the NSF CAREER award described in this article is available on the NSF website. For more information about Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor Amy Orsborn and her research work, visit her UW ECE bio page.