BWH Neurology Grand Rounds: Intracortical Brain-Computer Interfaces for the Restoration of Communication and Mobility

Leigh R. Hochberg, M.D., Ph.D. is a Neurointensivist and Vascular Neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Senior Lecturer on Neurology at Harvard Medical School; the L. Herbert Ballou University Professor of Engineering and Professor of Brain Science in the School of Engineering and Carney Institute for Brain Science at Brown University; and Associate Director, Dept. of Veterans Affairs RR&D Center for Neurorestoration and Neurotechnology (CfNN) in Providence, Rhode Island. He also directs the MGH Center for Neurotechnology and Neurorecovery (CNTR), and is the IDE Sponsor-Investigator and Principal Investigator of the BrainGate clinical trials, conducted by a consortium of scientists and clinicians at Brown, Emory University, MGH, Providence VA, Stanford, and University of California, Davis. Dr. Hochberg’s research focuses on the development and testing of novel neurotechnologies to help people with paralysis and other neurologic disorders. 

Dr. Hochberg and his research with the collaborative BrainGate team have been honored with the Joseph Martin Prize in Basic Research, the Herbert Pardes Prize for Excellence in Clinical Research, the first Israel Brain Technologies international B.R.A.I.N. Prize, presented by President Shimon Peres, the Derek Denny-Brown Young Neurological Scholar Award, the CERF Prize in Medical Engineering, and the Paul B. Magnuson Award from the US Department of Veterans Affairs. Dr. Hochberg’s BrainGate research, which has been published Nature, Lancet, Science Translational Medicine, eLife, the Journal of Neuroscience, the Journal of Neural Engineering, and others, is supported by the VA Rehabilitation R&D Service, the National Institutes of Health including the BRAIN Initiative/NINDS and NIDCD, and philanthropies including the ALS Association, the American Heart Association, the Movement Disorder Foundation and the Cerebral Palsy Alliance Research Foundation. Together with Paralympic Silver Medalist Jennifer French, Dr. Hochberg recently launched the Implantable BCI Collaborative Community (iBCI-CC), a multi-stakeholder forum dedicated to advancing regulatory science in iBCIs.