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Maryam M. Shanechi
Born
Iran
Alma mater University of Toronto, MIT
Awards NIH Director's New Innovator Award

MIT Technology Review's Innovators Under 35

NSF CAREER Award

ONR Young Investigator Award

American Society for Engineering Educations's Curtis W. McGraw Research Award

Science News 10 Scientists to Watch

Popular Science Brilliant 10
Scientific career
Thesis Real-time brain-machine interface architectures : neural decoding from plan to movement (2011)

Maryam M. Shanechi is a brilliant scientist who was born in Iran and is now an American neuroengineer. She studies how to understand the brain's signals to control special devices called brain-machine interfaces. These devices can help people by connecting their thoughts to computers or machines. She has won many awards for her amazing work, including being named one of MIT Technology Review's Innovators under 35. She is a professor at the University of Southern California, where she teaches about electrical and computer engineering, computer science, and biomedical engineering.

Her Journey to Science

Maryam Shanechi was born in Iran. When she was 16, she moved to Canada with her family. She earned her first degree in engineering from the University of Toronto in 2004.

After that, she moved to the MIT. There, she completed her master's degree in 2006 and her PhD in 2011. She then did more research at Harvard Medical School. In 2012, she became a faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley. Later, she taught at Cornell University before joining the University of Southern California. Today, she is a Dean's Professor at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering.

Understanding the Brain

While studying at MIT, Maryam Shanechi became very interested in something called neural decoding. This means trying to "read" the original meaning from the brain's electrical signals.

Decoding Movement

She created a special computer program, called an algorithm. This program could figure out where a monkey wanted to move a cursor on a screen. It did this just by looking at the monkey's brain activity. She later made her program even better. It could decode brain signals much faster, in just a few milliseconds. This was much quicker than older methods.

Her lab, the Shanechi Lab, has found new ways to understand brain activity. They can tell which brain signals are most important for predicting behavior. This helps improve how we decode brain messages. They also use different types of brain measurements together. This helps them understand how different parts of the brain work together.

Helping with Medicine

In 2013, she developed a brain decoding method that could help doctors. It could automatically control how much anesthesia a patient needs. Anesthesia is medicine that makes you sleep during surgery. Her team worked with doctors from Massachusetts General Hospital and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They were able to automatically control how deeply rodents were in a medically-induced coma. They did this by watching the rodents' brain activity.

Understanding Mood

Shanechi is also very interested in using brain decoding to help with mental health problems. These include conditions like PTSD and depression. Her team developed a way to figure out a person's mood from their brain activity.

They studied seven patients who had tiny electrodes placed in their brains. These electrodes were there to monitor their epilepsy. While the electrodes were in place, the patients answered questions about how they were feeling. Shanechi's lab then used this information to match brain activity with different moods. This work won a special award called the 3rd prize in the International BCI Awards.

Her lab has also created ways to predict how brain networks react to ongoing deep brain stimulation (DBS). DBS is a treatment that uses electrical pulses to help with certain brain conditions. In the future, Shanechi hopes to use these techniques to automatically stimulate the brain. This could happen when a change in mood is detected, helping people feel better.

Awards and Honors

Maryam Shanechi has received many important awards for her groundbreaking work:

  • NIH Director's New Innovator Award, 2020
  • Science News 10 Scientists to Watch, 2019
  • Popular Science Brilliant 10, 2015
  • MIT Technology Review Innovators Under 35, 2014
  • NSF CAREER Award, 2015
  • Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, 2019
  • American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Curtis W. McGraw Research Award, 2021
  • Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) Award, 2016
  • Mid-Career Achievement Award, University of Toronto Engineering, 2019
  • One Mind Rising Star Award, 2022
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