December Faculty (and Alumni) Spotlight - David Borton PhD'12
David Borton received his Bachelor of Science in Biomedical Engineering from Washington University in St. Louis in 2006 and his PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Brown University in 2012. He then received the Marie Curie IIF award for Brain-spinal interface research conducted at the Swiss National Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland under the direction of Gregoire Courtine. Borton returned to Brown in 2014 and is now an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Brown University School of Engineering (SOE), the Brown Institute for Brain Science (BIBS), and a Biomedical Engineer at the Providence Veterans Affairs Center for Neurorestoration and Neurotechnology (CfNN). Prof. Borton was awarded the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Young Faculty Award in 2015, and his laboratory is currently supported by the U.S. Department of Defense, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, the National Institute of Mental Health, the International Research in Paraplegia Foundation, and several industry contracts.
1) When did you know you wanted to be a biomedical engineer/researcher?
I think it’s a continuously evolving thought process. In the past I’ve wanted to be many things; a programmer, a physicist at NASA, a protein chemist. Through my education I’ve had great mentors in undergraduate research at Washington University in St. Louis and graduate research here at Brown and I really began to appreciate the fusion of technology and neuroscience and how we could help people suffering from neurological disease and disorder this confirmed that I wanted to be a researcher in this field. Who knows how long this will last, though. Nothing is permanent and I believe it is important that we are doing what we want to do in every moment. I want to be doing research now and that’s what I’m committed to.
2) Of all of the publications you have written, is there one that you are most proud of? Why?
I think that the first paper I was most proud of was the culmination of my PhD work, which was building a neuroimplantable recording system. After that, I worked on a paper that combined neural recording with reanimating the body after spinal cord injury in animals, and I’m very proud of that first step of combining technology with delivering therapy to help someone. One of the papers was in Nature, which has a very long process for review and publication and going through that process was enlightening.
3) Did you ever do experiments that didn’t work?
As a professor and lab at Brown, I am very new so we’ll see. The brain is such an unknown that when our hypothesis isn’t proven true that just means we have more to study. For example, we were studying the motor cortex of walking animals. We expected the brain not to have a lot of activity when the animals were walking based on a lot of previous data from other published studies, so we were surprised to find that the leg area of motor cortex was very active when walking. Now we are taking a detour to explore that further.
4) How do you choose the projects your group works on?
My laboratory has a vision to design, develop, and employ neurotechnology to better understand the nervous system and improve student lives. With that in mind, graduate students enter my lab with a specific idea of a project that they want to work on and then I collaborate with them to shape their project. Others come in at a more exploratory phase and I work to guide them to finding the path that is best for them. I think it is most important, though, that students take ownership and leadership of their projects because that’s when they are the most passionate and work the hardest. I’m particularly driven to research the brain and nervous system because it is still such an unknown despite how many people are researching the brain.
5) What three qualities are most important for ensuring success as a young researcher?
Curiosity, creativity, a smile on their face [positivity]