Multifunctional Regenerative Neural Interfaces

21st April 2021

Timing : 1 pm EDT

For zoom link to the talks, please email mjgc@mit.edu with your institute email and mention affiliation


For a list of all talks at the NanoBio seminar Series Spring'21, see here


Interventions are needed to induce nerve repair after spinal cord injury partially since spontaneous axon regeneration in the adult mammalian central nervous system is limited and the growing axons lack a sense of directionality and do not effectively grow along a nerve gap. In addition, our understanding of the spine-brain circuitry and the role of different neurons for recovery after spinal cord injury is limited. In this seminar, microchannel axon guidance scaffolds for bridging nerve gaps as well as optoelectronic devices for chronic light stimulation to study the spinal circuitry are discussed. Concluding remarks include discussions on the direction of the field and developing active implants that both promote axon growth and provide linear guidance as well as opportunities for the expansion of these technologies for organ augmentation.



Snow
Dena Shahriari
Assistant Professor,
UBC and ICORD, Vancouver, Canada


Dena Shahriari is a biomaterials scientist and a neural engineer. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia (UBC) and the International Collaboration on Repair Discoveries (ICORD) at Vancouver, Canada. At UBC, she is the director of the BioAugmentative Interfaces laboratory which is at the intersection of Materials Science, Electrical Engineering and Medicine. Some of the missions of the lab are in providing nerve repair, developing prosthetic interfaces and improving organ function after paralysis. Dena obtained her BS from the University of California Berkeley and her PhD from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor followed by postdoctoral fellowship with Prof. Polina Anikeeva at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is a recipient of the US Nasional Science Foundation Graduate Student Fellowship and the Craig H. Neilsen Spinal Cord Injury Postdoctoral Fellowship.