Miller Laboratory of Limb Motor Control

After nearly four decades, I have begun the process of closing down my work with monkeys. It’s been a rewarding process to share this work with a host of very talented students, post-docs and technicians. The work spanned quite a range of efforts, focused initially on basic science, then shifting toward human applications through the development of effective Brain-Computer Interfaces. I am delighted to enter the final phase of that progression now, through an exciting new collaboration with the Cortical Bionics research group (https://www.corticalbionics.com/). With my colleagues there and at Shirley Ryan AbilityLab, I will be pursuing a final major project to develop a muscle-based BCI for humans with spinal cord injury. In addition, I will continue to pursue computational work and to analyze existing data with a much smaller lab group. As a consequence, I will no longer be accepting new graduate students or post-docs in my lab.

The primary goal of the research we do in this lab is to understand the nature of the somatosensory and motor signals within the brain that control our movements.

We study the "language" of these control signals and the networks of neurons that produce them. Along with this basic research, we are working to develop neural interfaces that directly connect the brain of a spinal cord injured patient with the outside world. These interfaces will ultimately allow patients to operate a computer or a prosthetic device. They may also bypass the injured spinal cord in order to reactivate paralyzed muscles, or to restore the sense of touch and limb movement.