Center for Neural Engineering Home

The Penn State Center for Neural Engineering is a university-wide Center, bridging the campuses and Colleges of Engineering and Science at University Park, with the College of Medicine at Hershey. It is housed within facilities of the Department of Neurosurgery and the Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics.

The Center is positioned to facilitate and enable collaboration between faculty from the Huck Institutes for the Life Sciences, Materials Research, and Neuroscience Institutes at Penn State, and forms a physical conduit for faculty and students from across the Engineering Departments, the Integrative Biosciences Neuroscience Program, Physics, Mathematics, and Biology, as well as trainees and faculty from Neurosurgery, Neurology, and Psychiatry. The Center has resident core faculty, with a considerable number of faculty Affiliates drawn from University Park and Hershey.

The Center enables the successful conduct of interdisciplinary research and acquisition of funding for projects that individual Penn State scientists could not perform on their own.

The Center for Neural Engineering provides the core facilities to:

• Coordinate collaboration between Departments at University Park, and between University Park and Hershey.

• Provide facilities and technical skill to Faculty, Postdoctoral fellows, and Students seeking to work in this area.

• Provide core resources in terms of office space, administrative support, computational facilities, laboratories, and faculty customized for carrying out the missions of NIH sponsored Program Project and Center grants.

• Provide an extensive series of educational forums each week focusing on whole animal physiology, cellular physiology, dynamical neuroscience, biological control engineering, and a campus-wide Neural Engineering Seminar series.

• Develop the intellectual property which will enable Penn State to develop the next generation of smart devices for the clinical treatment of dynamical diseases of the brain, such as Epilepsy and Parkinson’s disease, as well as improved neural prosthetics to replace lost function in the disabled.

• Develop novel curricula and teaching laboratories to serve the missions of the Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics, the Department of Neurosurgery and the Interdepartmental Neuroscience program.

• To serve as a center for Junior Faculty development at Hershey. Physician-Scientists recruited at Hershey will have office and laboratory space in the Center for Neural Engineering facilities that will be created in the Life Sciences II Building at University Park, where they will spend one or more days per week enabling them to develop their research programs while simultaneously attending to their clinical responsibilities at Hershey.

• To serve as a center for Senior Faculty development at Hershey. The Center would form a framework that would enable senior clinicians to spend one or more days per week either learning new science and engineering skills, or advancing their ongoing research.

• The Center actively fosters Outreach to youth in Pennsylvania, as well as to improve medicine and engineering in the developing world.

Presently occupying 3000 square feet of customized space in the Earth-Engineering Sciences Building, the Center will move in 2010 to 22,000 square feet in the new Life Sciences II/Material Science Building. Within this space there will be space for individual investigators, but importantly, there will be substantial shared facilities to meet the above needs. Specifically, there will be several different sizes of conference rooms, with video conference capability to facilitate the interaction with Hershey and other investigators. Significant shared facilities will be created for histology, computerized microscopy, animal behavioral monitoring, and computational resources. Offices are planned for six Hershey faculty, MDs and PhDs, to be in residence at any one time. A novel teaching laboratory will serve as a teaching platform to teach the concepts, hardware, and software of Brain-Machine Interface engineering to advanced undergraduate and graduate students within the Engineering College.

We anticipate that this Center will serve as a model and test bed for serious long-term development of bridges between the strengths of University Park and the College of Medicine campuses.

Key developments from 2006-2008 include:

Ongoing Research Projects

Future Developments