News

April Faculty Spotlight - Leigh Hochberg

April 1, 2018
interview

1) When did you know you wanted to be a biomedical engineer/researcher?

I always knew I wanted to be a physician. My dad was a doctor, his dad was a doctor. I read every part of the dewey decimal system that had to do with medicine in elementary school. When I came to Brown as an undergraduate I still knew I wanted to go into medicine and then I started to do a little research. I took Neuro100 as a first semester sophomore and I had an opportunity to work with neurologists in the summer after my sophomore year. I then took a wet neurobiology course, Neuro102, with John Donoghue, and the things I was reading about aplysia (sea hares), getting to work with frog sciatic nerves in a course. Led to an honors thesis and suddenly the research became very real. I was spending all of my time in the lab doing research and it was incredible. Around the same time I learned about the MD-PHD programs and when I realized I could do both, that was that. Ultimately, my desire to be a researcher was born out of my Brown undergraduate career.

 

2) Of all of your publications, is there one you are particularly proud of?

In 2004, we published in Nature the first of the BrainGate trials. It was the first time any person had had an intracortical array in their brain for any period of time. It was the first time somebody with tetraplegia had easily controlled the cursor on a computer screen. Actually two people controlled the cursor just by thinking about the movement of their hands. For me, it was a wonderful experience to be involved in making that research happen. To work for that paper with an incredible guy with a cervical spinal cord injury who joined us for the trial and was a pioneer, being the first person to have this put in his brain. All of it was very exciting, but it was also the result of 40 years of fundamental neuroscience and neuroengineering that came before it. I think that proof of concept was important in the pursuit of modern day brain-computer interfaces.

 

3) Have you ever done an experiment that didn’t work?

Oh every day! We have a technology that everyday we try to make better and in the process of trying to make it better sometimes we don’t. That often comes down to how we are decoding the brain activity and how we are translating that decoded brain activity to control a device. If everything we did made it better it wouldn’t be research. It would be a development project and we would have a company. We have a tiny signal from a large brain. There’s an estimated 80 billion neurons in the brain and we’re recording from a few dozen to maybe one hundred and from that we’re trying to decode in real time reach and grasp movements and complex activities. It’s surprising, bordering on magical, that it works at all.

 

4) How do you choose the projects that your group works on?

We are driven by three circles in a venn diagram. The first is what we want to achieve. Our large goals are to restore communication to people with locked-in syndrome, allow a person to control a prosthetic limb or a robotic assistive device with their brain, and eventually reconnect brain to limb in spinal cord injury patient. There are other practical goals that need to fit into that, such as being able to decode neural signals accurately, to have a system that is recording 24/7 without need someone with a PhD standing next to it. The second part of the venn diagram is what we are funded to do and thankfully there is often an overlap there. We are funded largely by extramural grants from the federal government to achieve very specific goals and we need to achieve those. The third space is what the student wants to learn and contribute, which is arguably the most important part. I don’t just assign students to projects because there is so much groupthink that goes on in this lab and across our collaborations with other universities. The best and happiest student is the one that’s doing what they want to do, so usually I let them tell me what they want to do.

 

5) What three qualities do you think are most important for a young researcher?

Being inquisitive, persistent, and optimistic.