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Nishal Shah

Nishal Shah

Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering McNair Scholar in Neuroengineering Member, Ken Kennedy Institute Adjunct Assistant Professor of Neurosurgery at Baylor College of Medicine

Electrical and Computer Engineering

CONTACT

ns157@rice.edu

WEBSITE(S)| Profile | Rice Brain Computer Interface Lab

SURF Mentoring

Potential projects/topics: My lab is running an intracortical brain computer interface program where we record neural activity from motor and frontal cortices of people with paralysis. Our goal is build a brain-controlled robot interface that allows participants to feed themselves completely independently.
The SURF project is flexible based on student interest. Potential topics: (1) Understanding the neural representation of complex movements and cognitive processes at single-cell resolution, (2) Building sophisticated decoders for inferring movement intent from neural recordings, (3) Build the robot feeding system, (4) Using artificial intelligence and robotics foundation models to augment human control.

Potential skills gained: Machine learning / Statistics, Robotics, Computational and Systems Neuroscience

Required qualifications:

  • Required skills: Foundation in programming is helpful.

Direct mentor: Faculty/P.I.

Research Areas

His lab aims to build a computational toolbox for reading out and writing in information to neural circuits in real-time and at cellular resolution. His lab seeks to answer the following issues: How are flexible, high-degrees of freedom movements such as finger movements, limb movements, and speech represented in the brain? Can we use intracortical microelectrode array recordings in human participants with paralysis to enable full-body movement in virtual reality? How do we reproduce rich spatio-temporal neural activity patterns using electrical stimulation? How do we use existing experimental data to develop the next-generation of low-power, large-scale and high-density implantable BCIs?