Taiyun Chi
Rice University, TX·Engineering·Early-career
Both brain implants and wireless radios run into the same kind of limit: the electronics at the interface, whether it touches neurons or the air, constrains what the whole system can do. Work in this lab designs that hardware, from integrated circuits and flexible probes that record and stimulate the brain to antennas that compute.
- Fields
Engineering
Biomedical Engineering
Neuroscience
- Topics
neural interfaces
brain-machine interface
brain-computer interface
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Feb 2028
What they work on
- Build a fully packaged implanted neural interface with more than ten times the channel count of current systems, combining a low-power application-specific integrated circuit for recording, stimulation and digitization with a flexible intracortical probe and a high-speed digital backend.
- Record the full neural signal spectrum, from local field potentials reflecting many neurons to individual action potentials, while providing programmable electrical stimulation from the same chip.
- Develop non-invasive deep brain stimulation using temporally interfering electromagnetic waves, through multi-physics modeling, hardware implementation, and validation in tissue-mimicking phantoms and an animal model.
- Develop computational antenna (CompTenna) hardware that performs programmable analog computation at millimeter-wave and sub-terahertz frequencies, together with a computational model and simulator for rapid design synthesis.
- Use the added degrees of control from CompTenna for energy-efficient optimal beamforming in single- and multi-user wireless links and for distributed interference management.
- Develop a layered architecture that uses computational antennas for joint wireless sensing and communication.
More about the research
One project builds devices that read out and stimulate neural activity in far more places at once, and a way to stimulate deep brain structures without surgery. The other rethinks the antenna as a programmable computing element for high-frequency wireless communication and sensing.
Why it matters
Higher-channel-count implants could let paralyzed patients control prosthetic limbs with more degrees of freedom, and stimulating deep brain targets with interfering electromagnetic waves could eventually treat brain disorders without implanted electrodes, avoiding long-term surgical risk. On the wireless side, antennas that compute could raise network capacity and enable new sensing functions on next-generation mobile devices operating at millimeter-wave and sub-terahertz frequencies.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
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Rochester Institute of Technology, NY·Engineering
Develop algorithms that recover sets of similar gene sequences from unordered DNA sequencing reads, to detect antimicrobial resistance genes in microbial communities.
Yasaman Ghasempour
Princeton University, NJ·Engineering·Early-career
Steer narrow terahertz beams electronically using a new multi-slit antenna, in which the beam's angle depends on the signal frequency and the slit geometry, to overcome the high signal loss at frequencies above 100 GHz.
Subhanshu Gupta
Washington State University, WA·Engineering
Use the frequency-dependent beams of true-time-delay arrays to cut beam-training overhead, and design a low-latency protocol that trains beams and estimates interference at the same time in dense millimeter-wave networks.
The school
Rice University: 24 labs on PI Pages, $278M a year on research, 267 research doctorates a year.
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