from the Directors

It is a really exciting time in Neural Engineering across Emory and Georgia Tech. Our vision is to create intelligent, adaptive, and personalized technologies to augment brain and neural function. Since the Neural Engineering Center (NEC) was established 8 years ago at Georgia Tech, the community supporting that vision has grown and flourished beyond our expectations! We’re happy to have played a role in faculty hires across campuses, new training programs and majors, interdisciplinary research collaborations, and the launching of the broader GTNeuro effort that is now taking wing. As the national priority and interest in neurotechnology escalates, we’ve seen increasing interest from students and industry stakeholders, along with new possibilities for commercialization.

With this new landscape, we launch the next phase of the Georgia Tech and Emory Neural Engineering Center. In this newsletter we highlight some of our successes in attracting exciting faculty and outstanding students, and in establishing resources to support the community, notably our NIH T32 training program in Computational Neural Engineering, the McCamish Parkinson’s Disease Innovation Program, and the new Lanier Foundation Neuroengineering Undergraduate Research Program. The spirit of these programs embody the interdisciplinary, collaborative path needed to move the field forward.

Following all of this amazing growth, and after the isolating pandemic period, we seek to connect our community and create a fertile environment for cross-cutting research at the forefront of neural engineering. Our mission is to foster an inclusive, collaborative community to innovate and lead in research, training, & translation. We want the GT/Emory NEC to be a resource to support the free exchange of ideas, data, algorithms, and excitement about creating advances that are truly greater than the sum of the parts.

As an important part of this community, we’d like to personally invite each of you to be active in the Neural Engineering Center as we look to provide points of exchange and connection through online resources, idea exchange forums, collaborative projects, and just having fun together. We are awed by the amazing talent and energy of each and every one of you and hope that you will find–as we have–that any efforts we put toward this community are rewarded in spades intellectually, personally, and professionally.

Lena and Garrett