Implantable neural interfaces hold the promise to offer new therapies for brain disorders when symptoms no longer improve with medications and other treatments. Despite significant advances in neural interface microsystems over the past decade, the small number of recording and stimulation channels and limited embedded processing in the existing technologies remain a barrier to their therapeutic potential. As a result, existing brain implants do not adequately meet the clinical needs for severe psychiatric illness and other disabling neurological conditions such as epilepsy and Parkinson’s disease. In this talk, I will present an overview of our research on the integration of modern signal processing and machine learning techniques in neural prosthetic system-on-chips (SoCs) for epilepsy, movement, and mental disorders, and for the next-generation brain-machine interfaces. Our goal is to enable more effective CMOS-based medical devices for a wide range of brain disorders in the future.

---

Bio

Mahsa Shoaran is currently an Assistant Professor in the Institute of Electrical and Micro Engineering and Center for Neuroprosthetics of EPFL. From 2018 to 2020, she was an Assistant Professor at Cornell University, New York, and a Postdoctoral Fellow at Caltech from 2015 to 2018. She received her PhD from EPFL and her B.Sc. and M.Sc. from Sharif University of Technology. Mahsa is a recipient of the 2021 ERC Starting Grant, 2018 Google AI Faculty Research Award, and two Swiss NSF Postdoctoral Fellowships. Her research interests include low-power circuit design for neural interfaces, machine learning accelerators, and neuromodulation therapies for neurological disorders. Dr. Shoaran serves on the Technical Program Committee of the IEEE ISSCC and CICC, and as chair in BioMedical Electronics for the IEEE International Conference on Electronics Circuits and Systems. She was named a Rising Star in EECS by MIT in 2015.