Last week I had the pleasure of listening to the work that each of my BSURF mentors were doing. It was fascinating getting to learn more about everyone’s research, and I am so impressed by the complexity of some of these projects and by their potential implications! Personally as an engineer, I found the project done by Ricardo to be very interesting, as I immediately saw how work done in different labs can have overlaps or similarities in topics.
As many of us have already described, Ricardo’s project involves working with the data produced from brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) that record neural firing rates. He is trying to better understand the relationship between actions themselves and the neural firing rate, or finding a lag time and seeing how it differs between unimanual and bimanual actions or data sets. The result of this project can tell us a lot about improvements that need to be made before a brain-machine interface can work almost instantaneously.
His project also made me think about my own research in a different way as well. I had never really considered the lag-time of recording data from the electrodes designed in our lab, but I realize that it could be a potential factor or result of the electrode not being fully compatible with the brain itself.
Once again, thank you all for your chalk talks last week, as I really learned a lot more about different aspects of biology and I look forward to seeing more at the poster session at the end of the program!
