Practicum co-directors Moore, Shriki and Stephanie Jones, a professor of neuroscience at Brown, connected in 2021 over a shared interest in neurotechnology and using computational neuroscience methods to develop new insights into brain dynamics in health and disease. Mindful of that year’s pandemic protocols, they organized a virtual summer session in which graduate students in the neurotech hub at Ben-Gurion and the Carney Institute at Brown collaborated over Zoom. In 2023, Shriki and other Ben-Gurion faculty hosted the Brown University graduate students in Israel. 

This year, with funding support from Lewis and Ina Heafitz (who graduated from Brown in 1966), the practicum took place at Brown. The format remained the same: classes during the mornings (led by Moore, Shriki and Jones as well as Brown faculty including David Borton, David Sheinberg and Carlos Aizenman), with group project work in the afternoons. Everything culminates in a pitch session. 

Jones said that the organizers made a few tweaks this year, including changing the name of the practicum from “neurotech” to “embodied brain technology.”

“This is something that the neuroscientists here at Carney think a lot about,” Jones said. “It’s not just the brain; it’s the brain connected to a body. It’s the interaction among these systems that allow us to do the things that we do. The idea is to bring information from the body — movement, blood, physiological signals — and combine that with brain signals to develop technologies that have an impact in the world.”

The other shift had to do with empowering students to brainstorm productively and efficiently. In previous years, Moore said, students sometimes struggled to find inspiration and then would be reluctant to pivot if things weren’t going well, losing precious time. This year, before the students met in person, they engaged in online sessions for techniques in idea generation, and spent the first day of the practicum learning methods for group idea generation with Carl Moore, an expert in that field. 

Bringing ideas from the lab to market

The spirit of the practicum is highly entrepreneurial, Jones said, with speakers presenting on how to bring ideas to market. Those included Danny Warshay, executive director of Brown’s Nelson Center for Entrepreneurship, and Jones, who shared her own experience launching a biotech startup. The training also included a lecture on patent and licensing practices from Melissa Simon of the Brown Technology Innovations office. 

“We’re teaching about getting ideas out of the lab and into the hands of people, and urging students to think about the fact that just because you’re building something doesn’t mean that people need it or will pay for it — so how does it get paid for, and how does it get out there?” Jones said. “We’re really not taught that in scientific environments.”

Jacob Tajchman, who is pursuing a master’s degree in neuroengineering at Brown, was intrigued by this facet.

“This workshop is about linking measurements that you can take of the body and the brain and applying that to real-world solutions in the most direct sense,” Tajchman said. “You identify the solution, you identify where the needs are, and how you, with a little circuit board, can contribute to solutions.”

His group is working on a system to combine heart rate data with machine learning models to assess whether someone is having a panic attack. Tajchman, who as an engineer is used to building things, focused on creating the device used to measure heart rate signals, while teammates dove into on data analysis and marketing. But he said he appreciated the opportunity to work as a team to think about what happens to ideas beyond the lab.

Each group not only has students from Brown and Ben-Gurion (or from Howard University and the University of Rhode Island, each of which had one participant), but also an intentional mix of interests — which, as Tajchman noted, reflects the division of labor at a startup business. In the group working on the dashboard device to prevent drowsiness, for example, the students’ academic and research interests spanned clinical psychology, electrical engineering, neuroscience, data science, neuromorphic computing and machine learning. 

“We used the full potential of everyone on our team, for maximum production,” said Adva Feldman, a master's student in electrical engineering at Ben-Gurion University.

Another group of four students started with a very strong idea: to use EEG biomarkers to predict when people were going to fall and help them catch their balance. They created a headset with accelerometers that sit on the ears to show head position, and then set about refining the design.

Throughout the week, the group had heard feedback from venture capital experts, who brough a different perspective than fellow scientists. 

“You realize how much you have to think about to get an idea to market,” said Anton Pasternak, a master’s student in cognitive and neuroscience at Ben-Gurion University, who also brought programming experience to the project. “This was really useful, but also a little anxiety-inducing.”

All of the ideas were impressively distinctive and well-executed, Jones said. The winners of pitch competition, who received the prize of 3D printed dolphins — plus bragging rights — were the members of Tajchman’s team, who created the panic attack prevention device dubbed the Embracelet. 

“It’s been really cool,” Tajchman said the day before the competition. “Before this, I didn’t really see myself as someone who was going to pitch a startup. But I now know that it’s something achievable, something that I could do.”