The Institute for Biology, Engineering, and Medicine (I-BEAM) is excited to announce that Professor David Borton, our current Associate Director, will be assuming the role of Interim Director starting on August 1, 2024. 

Professor Borton thanked our inaugural Director, Vicki Colvin, for her service in leading I-BEAM through its early days, saying “Professor Colvin was profoundly successful in working with the administration to establish the Institute around the shared goals and visions of the Division of Biology and Medicine, the School of Engineering, and Provost. I am grateful for her efforts and for her guidance during this transition.” 

Professor Borton is an inspiring, dedicated, and inclusive leader who will successfully lead I-BEAM into the next chapter. “My philosophy as a Director is the philosophy I’ve always had: people first,” said Professor Borton. “My role as the Director is to make sure the Institute supports the incredible ideas of our faculty, staff, and students.” Already, Professor Borton is meeting with I-BEAM community members to see “what they could imagine the Institute doing for them.”

Professor Borton embodies the spirit of collaboration, innovation, and outside-the-box thinking that defines Brown. After leaving his home in Seattle at 15 years old to play professional soccer in Brazil, Professor Borton’s “curiosities of the scientific world” led him to Washington University in St. Louis. There, he spent years working hard to catch up with other biomedical engineering students—set back by the time he spent out of school and on the pitch. Eventually, he landed in a lab working in the budding field of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) research. That work solidified his interest in working at the intersection of neuroscience and biomedical engineering. 

During his undergraduate career, Professor Borton read a paper in Nature about the early BrainGate research occurring at Brown and was eager to join the Brown community. In 2006, Professor Borton came to Brown and began researching implantable neurosensors under the guidance of Professor Arto Nurmikko. Professor Borton described the work he was involved in as, “a wonderful collaboration between this very engineering laboratory and the very neuroscience laboratory of John Donoghue.”

Outside of the lab, Professor Borton got to know the Brown community well through hours spent chatting with faculty, postdoctoral students, and peers at the Graduate Center Bar and on the climbing walls of Lincoln’s Rock Spot. While not all of his peers were engineering students, he said Brown’s “highly interdisciplinary collaborative environment” allowed them to find similarities between their differing projects and goals. 

After completing his Ph.D. in 2012, Professor Borton received the Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship to perform his postdoctoral training at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland, where he—under the mentorship of Professor Gregoire Courtine—partnered with Medtronic to integrate the implantable neurosensors developed at Brown with spinal cord electrical neuromodulation. The resulting “brain-spine interface,” later published in Nature, paved the way for restoring functional movement in people with devastating spinal cord injuries.

Professor Borton said he was drawn back to Brown in 2014 by “the supportive, positive, and creative community” and the quality of Brown’s scientific research. “There are really excellent thinkers here,” he said. Borton had also grown to love Rhode Island after living on a sailboat for five years of his P.hD., saying “the accessibility of fun activities around the state is unparalleled — whether going to the beach or downtown, it’s all right there.”

Since his return to Brown, Professor Borton has started a laboratory of his own, served as an Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering in the School of Engineering, Associate Professor of Brain Science at the Carney Institute for Brain Science, and Associate Professor of Neurosurgery at the Rhode Island Hospital. The Borton Lab focuses on developing neurotechnology to both answer fundamental questions about the nervous system and treat people with neurological injuries or illnesses. In 2016, Professor Borton joined the Department of Veterans Affairs Center for Neurotechnology and Neurorestoration (CfNN) at the Providence VA Medical System as a Biomedical Engineer, applying his research to veteran needs. 

Professor Borton has received numerous accolades for his work including the DAPRA Young Faculty Award, DAPRA Director’s Award, and the Marie Curie International Incoming Fellowship. His research has led to over 40 publications in articles and conference papers—including features in Nature, Neuron, and Science Translational Medicine.

To Professor Borton, the most rewarding part of his work at Brown is seeing the impact he has on students and patients alike. As a leading researcher at Brown, he has worked with dozens of Ph.D. candidates, undergraduate students, master’s students, and postdoctoral fellows and has taught courses in instrumentation design and implantable devices. He loves seeing students “go off and do great science.” 

“It is incredibly rewarding,” Professor Borton said, to see “whatever small piece of their world I played a role in.” His impact on patients is also profound. One clinical trial he facilitated alongside the Baylor College of Medicine, Mount Sinai, the University of Pittsburgh, and Carnegie Mellon treated people with severe obsessive-compulsive disorder. “Seeing a person who was insular and stuck in their world suddenly start smiling, talking, and communicating just after the switch of a button on the simulation” was “simply incredible to witness,” he said. 

Now, Professor Borton is ready to take his years of experience at Brown and apply them to his work as I-BEAM Director. The I-BEAM Director is responsible for leading the Institute through strategic initiatives and collaborations that will harness the talent of our researchers, students, faculty, and staff to translate research into meaningful and impactful healthcare solutions. As Director, Professor Borton will manage I-BEAM’s operating budget, oversee our biomedical engineering graduate program, and advance the incredible work already underway.

Professor Borton wants to facilitate “a connected community” of clinicians, engineers, and biologists where clinicians are “on campus more” and engineers are “at the hospital more.” That kind of collaboration is how Professor Borton envisions I-BEAM “effectively addressing the real problems that are out there facing patients.”

“We have all sorts of amazing ideas and tools,” Professor Borton said. “I’m excited to be supporting the collaborative research that will bring these ideas and tools to the patient bedside.” We are excited to welcome Professor Borton to his new role. We look forward to watching I-BEAM continue to thrive under his leadership.