Electronics on the brain

How electronics can help with neurological disorders.

  • Mon 12th Oct 2020

One of the most important scientific and technological frontiers of our time is the interfacing of electronics with the human brain. This endeavour promises to help understand how the brain works and deliver new tools for diagnosis and treatment of pathologies including epilepsy and Parkinson’s disease. Current solutions, however, are limited by the materials that are brought in contact with the tissue and transduce signals across the biotic/abiotic interface. Recent advances in organic electronics have made available materials with a unique combination of attractive properties, including mechanical flexibility, mixed ionic/electronic conduction, enhanced biocompatibility, and capability for drug delivery. I will present examples of novel devices for recording and stimulation of neurons and show that organic electronic materials offer tremendous opportunities to study the brain and treat its pathologies.

Professor George Malliaras, Prince Philip Professor of Technology, Department of Engineering

George Malliaras is the Prince Philip Professor of Technology at the University of Cambridge. He received a BS in Physics from the Aristotle University (Greece) in 1991, and a PhD in Mathematics and Physical Sciences, cum laude, from the University of Groningen (the Netherlands) in 1995. After postdocs at the University of Groningen and at the IBM Almaden Research Center (California), he joined the faculty in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Cornell University (New York) in 1999. From 2006 to 2009 he served as the Lester B. Knight Director of the Cornell NanoScale Science & Technology Facility. He moved to the Ecole des Mines de St. Etienne (France) in 2009, where he started the Department of Bioelectronics and served as Department Head. He joined the University of Cambridge in 2017.

Prof. Malliaras' research on organic electronics and bioelectronics has been recognized with awards from the New York Academy of Sciences (Blavatnik Award), the US National Science Foundation, and DuPont, and with an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Linköping, Sweden. He is a Fellow of the Materials Research Society and of the Royal Society of Chemistry, and serves as a Deputy Editor of Science Advances. He is the Director of the EPSRC IRC in Targeted Delivery for Hard-to-Treat Cancers.

Attending lectures

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The lecture will be preceded by a short presentation from a CSAR PhD Award Winner.

Social protection policies in Bangladesh.

Nabila Idris, Centre of Development Studies, University of Cambridge Department of Politics and International Studies

Nabila Idris is a doctoral candidate at the University of Cambridge’s Centre of Development Studies. A Khazanah scholar at Cambridge, she has previously worked in the UK, China, Thailand and Bangladesh. Her doctoral research investigates the politics of welfare policymaking, with a focus on Bangladesh's social protection policies. In the past, she has served as the founding President of CommunityAction, a youth-led civil society organisation in Bangladesh. She is an alumnus of the US State Department’s International Visitors Leadership Program as well as the Swedish Institute’s Young Connectors of the Future program.

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