Synthetic Neurobiology Cirriculum(?)

godchaser · 04-25-2008, 07:38 PM

.

Training a Generation of Neuroengineers

Empowering students to improve a billion lives.
Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Neurological and psychiatric disorders such as traumatic brain injury, stroke, Parkinson's disease, autism, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and chronic pain affect well over a billion people worldwide. These disorders steal away not only life span, but also our selves and identities. More than $1,000,000,000,000 is spent yearly in the battle against these disorders, even in the absence of effective treatments for many of them. Compared with innovations in other fields, like cancer, neurotechnologies have trickled out of labs at a relatively slow pace, yielding a handful of good drugs, a couple of methods for brain stimulation, and a few ways to image and analyze brain structure and activity. Like many innovations in medicine and bioengineering, these triumphs often emerged in no small part by chance, which makes iterative improvement tricky. Clearly, something new is needed. That's why, over the past year, we've begun experimenting with a hands-on neuroengineering curriculum at MIT, in which undergraduate and graduate students actively engage in the process of becoming neuroengineers, learning to solve intractable problems of the brain by actually doing it.

Learning neuroengineering is a hands-on process. What do you need to learn to fix problems of the brain and nervous system? The answer is, in brief: whatever it takes. The brain is complex (with well over a hundred billion interconnected circuit elements), subtle (it mediates everything we sense, feel, decide, and do), and inaccessible (packed densely inside the skull). To be a neuroengineer, you must be able to take advantage of any idea or fact that you discover that lets you get a handle on a brain process or function. Teaching neuroengineering thus means empowering people to identify problems and create solutions, connecting often distant topics in logical and intuitive ways to arrive at elegant insights. In short, our students must learn neuroengineering by making it up as they go along.

With my colleagues at MIT, I've begun teaching students how to go through the neurotechnology life cycle, from concept to validation to revelation to the world. We've concocted a series of three hands-on classes, which are still in the beta-testing stage, to teach design, laboratory, and entrepreneurship skills. Students pick projects and are mentored to make them as high-impact, feasible, and novel as possible. These classes are aimed at helping students learn the principles of operation of the nervous system from an engineering standpoint, implement their best ideas in the lab, and learn the process of translating technologies out of the lab and into the world. In the first class, Principles of Neuroengineering, students learn the basic principles governing the reading of information out from, and getting information into, the nervous system. They also, alone or in interdisciplinary teams, design and model fundamentally new technologies that gain information about, or positively alter, the operation of the brain. In the second course, Applications of Neuroengineering, students do lab work, learning how to implement, debug, and validate technologies. They make plans, revise them when failure encroaches, and learn how to find collaborators, make contingency maps, and manage time and resources. Finally, in the last course, Neurotechnology Ventures, students explore how to get their technologies out of the lab and into the world, writing up business-plan executive summaries and defending their projects in class, and attending guest lectures by entrepreneurs who are paving the way in neuroengineering. Anyone can participate--even freshmen can get involved. The ideas that yield the best neuroengineering inventions are often absurdly simple.
The classes started a beta-testing run in February 2007. Last year, in the Principles of Neuroengineering class, students designed never-before-seen methods for reading out brain activity in a wearable device, delivering therapeutic genes to specific cell types in the nervous system, and precisely measuring blood flow in the brain. Some of the students even built prototypes of their devices. For the Applications of Neuroengineering class, we just received a pilot grant from the MIT Alumni Class Funds to supply students with consumables, so that they can implement and validate their very best ideas in the lab, learning from failure and iteration. Students enter this class with concrete ideas, and get to make them reality. (We don't yet have a dedicated laboratory at MIT for teaching neuroengineering, so students who are safety- and procedure-certified to work in my lab can do their projects there. I try to help the rest find other collaborating labs on campus in which to work.) And in the first round of Neurotechnology Ventures, up to 50 people (including some professors) came to hear speakers talk about their companies (with post-talk discussions often lasting late into the night). Twenty students completed the key project, the creation of a concise business plan for a technology.

Although it's still the early days, perhaps this is the beginning of a Synthetic Neurobiology curriculum. Like many endeavors, this current set of classes has had a long, evolutionary path. Joost Bonsen and Rutledge Ellis-Behnke, my co-instructors in the Neurotechnology Ventures class, envisioned such a class almost half a decade ago. When I arrived at MIT in 2006, I was deluged by e-mails from undergraduates and graduate students eager to enter the business of engineering the brain and mind. The time had come. But our work is only beginning. We are still revising our educational vision daily, as we define the abstraction layers for engineering the brain. In the long term, I will measure the success of this mission by the number of laboratories, companies, inventions, and, ultimately, cures that are accomplished by people who pass through this class. Someday, we will understand the brain and know how to fix its problems. But for now, we must focus on jump-starting this effort by encouraging direct action by the best minds in the world, at an intellectual scale that exceeds all that has come before.
Numerical data in the first paragraph is from a recent report by NeuroInsights, LLC.
Cite as: Boyden, E. S. "Teaching Neuroengineers." Ed Boyden's Blog, Technology Review. 4/21/08. (Technology Review: Blogs: Ed Boyden's blog: Training a Generation of Neuroengineers).

-

godchaser · 04-25-2008, 07:43 PM

godchaser · 04-25-2008, 07:51 PM

.

About Me

Ed Boyden is an assistant professor in the MIT Media Lab. His lab broadly invents new tools to engineer brain circuits, in order to treat intractable disorders, augment cognition, and better understand the nature of existence.

View Complete Bio
Email Me
Add RSS Feed

Recent Posts

.

godchaser · 04-25-2008, 07:54 PM

.

Links

Other essays

Engineering the Brain (March 2007)

Recent Tags

.

04-25-2008, 07:38 PM	#1 (permalink)
godchaser Piano User Join Date: Jun 2007 Posts: 404	Synthetic Neurobiology Cirriculum(?) . Home Infotech Biotech Nanotech Energy Biztech Blogs Videos Magazine Newsletters Events More Blogs \| Back to Ed Boyden's blog Training a Generation of Neuroengineers Empowering students to improve a billion lives. Tuesday, April 22, 2008 Neurological and psychiatric disorders such as traumatic brain injury, stroke, Parkinson's disease, autism, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and chronic pain affect well over a billion people worldwide. These disorders steal away not only life span, but also our selves and identities. More than $1,000,000,000,000 is spent yearly in the battle against these disorders, even in the absence of effective treatments for many of them. Compared with innovations in other fields, like cancer, neurotechnologies have trickled out of labs at a relatively slow pace, yielding a handful of good drugs, a couple of methods for brain stimulation, and a few ways to image and analyze brain structure and activity. Like many innovations in medicine and bioengineering, these triumphs often emerged in no small part by chance, which makes iterative improvement tricky. Clearly, something new is needed. That's why, over the past year, we've begun experimenting with a hands-on neuroengineering curriculum at MIT, in which undergraduate and graduate students actively engage in the process of becoming neuroengineers, learning to solve intractable problems of the brain by actually doing it. Learning neuroengineering is a hands-on process. What do you need to learn to fix problems of the brain and nervous system? The answer is, in brief: whatever it takes. The brain is complex (with well over a hundred billion interconnected circuit elements), subtle (it mediates everything we sense, feel, decide, and do), and inaccessible (packed densely inside the skull). To be a neuroengineer, you must be able to take advantage of any idea or fact that you discover that lets you get a handle on a brain process or function. Teaching neuroengineering thus means empowering people to identify problems and create solutions, connecting often distant topics in logical and intuitive ways to arrive at elegant insights. In short, our students must learn neuroengineering by making it up as they go along. With my colleagues at MIT, I've begun teaching students how to go through the neurotechnology life cycle, from concept to validation to revelation to the world. We've concocted a series of three hands-on classes, which are still in the beta-testing stage, to teach design, laboratory, and entrepreneurship skills. Students pick projects and are mentored to make them as high-impact, feasible, and novel as possible. These classes are aimed at helping students learn the principles of operation of the nervous system from an engineering standpoint, implement their best ideas in the lab, and learn the process of translating technologies out of the lab and into the world. In the first class, Principles of Neuroengineering, students learn the basic principles governing the reading of information out from, and getting information into, the nervous system. They also, alone or in interdisciplinary teams, design and model fundamentally new technologies that gain information about, or positively alter, the operation of the brain. In the second course, Applications of Neuroengineering, students do lab work, learning how to implement, debug, and validate technologies. They make plans, revise them when failure encroaches, and learn how to find collaborators, make contingency maps, and manage time and resources. Finally, in the last course, Neurotechnology Ventures, students explore how to get their technologies out of the lab and into the world, writing up business-plan executive summaries and defending their projects in class, and attending guest lectures by entrepreneurs who are paving the way in neuroengineering. Anyone can participate--even freshmen can get involved. The ideas that yield the best neuroengineering inventions are often absurdly simple. The classes started a beta-testing run in February 2007. Last year, in the Principles of Neuroengineering class, students designed never-before-seen methods for reading out brain activity in a wearable device, delivering therapeutic genes to specific cell types in the nervous system, and precisely measuring blood flow in the brain. Some of the students even built prototypes of their devices. For the Applications of Neuroengineering class, we just received a pilot grant from the MIT Alumni Class Funds to supply students with consumables, so that they can implement and validate their very best ideas in the lab, learning from failure and iteration. Students enter this class with concrete ideas, and get to make them reality. (We don't yet have a dedicated laboratory at MIT for teaching neuroengineering, so students who are safety- and procedure-certified to work in my lab can do their projects there. I try to help the rest find other collaborating labs on campus in which to work.) And in the first round of Neurotechnology Ventures, up to 50 people (including some professors) came to hear speakers talk about their companies (with post-talk discussions often lasting late into the night). Twenty students completed the key project, the creation of a concise business plan for a technology. Although it's still the early days, perhaps this is the beginning of a Synthetic Neurobiology curriculum. Like many endeavors, this current set of classes has had a long, evolutionary path. Joost Bonsen and Rutledge Ellis-Behnke, my co-instructors in the Neurotechnology Ventures class, envisioned such a class almost half a decade ago. When I arrived at MIT in 2006, I was deluged by e-mails from undergraduates and graduate students eager to enter the business of engineering the brain and mind. The time had come. But our work is only beginning. We are still revising our educational vision daily, as we define the abstraction layers for engineering the brain. In the long term, I will measure the success of this mission by the number of laboratories, companies, inventions, and, ultimately, cures that are accomplished by people who pass through this class. Someday, we will understand the brain and know how to fix its problems. But for now, we must focus on jump-starting this effort by encouraging direct action by the best minds in the world, at an intellectual scale that exceeds all that has come before. Numerical data in the first paragraph is from a recent report by NeuroInsights, LLC. Cite as: Boyden, E. S. "Teaching Neuroengineers." Ed Boyden's Blog, Technology Review. 4/21/08. (Technology Review: Blogs: Ed Boyden's blog: Training a Generation of Neuroengineers). -
godchaser Piano User Join Date: Jun 2007 Posts: 404

04-25-2008, 07:43 PM	#2 (permalink)
godchaser Piano User Join Date: Jun 2007 Posts: 404	Re: Synthetic Neurobiology Cirriculum(?) . Last edited by godchaser : 04-25-2008 at 07:56 PM.
godchaser Piano User Join Date: Jun 2007 Posts: 404

04-25-2008, 07:51 PM	#3 (permalink)
godchaser Piano User Join Date: Jun 2007 Posts: 404	Re: Synthetic Neurobiology Cirriculum(?) . About Me Ed Boyden is an assistant professor in the MIT Media Lab. His lab broadly invents new tools to engineer brain circuits, in order to treat intractable disorders, augment cognition, and better understand the nature of existence. View Complete Bio Email Me Add RSS Feed Recent Posts Training a Generation of Neuroengineers How to Think Synthetic Neurobiology Engineering the Brain: The Panel Open Philanthropy In Pursuit of Human Augmentation . Last edited by godchaser : 04-25-2008 at 07:57 PM.
godchaser Piano User Join Date: Jun 2007 Posts: 404

04-25-2008, 07:54 PM	#4 (permalink)
godchaser Piano User Join Date: Jun 2007 Posts: 404	Re: Synthetic Neurobiology Cirriculum(?) . Links Ed Boyden Neuroengineering and Neuromedia Group Other essays Engineering the Brain (March 2007) Recent Tags abstraction layers autism brain brain stimulation brain-machine interface cognition cognitive behavioral therapy contingencies conversation creativity depression digital camera documentation education engineering entrepreneurship epilepsy free market funding hands-on learning happiness how to human augmentation institutes Internet lab class language learning logarithmic memory microfinance mistakes MIT mit media lab neural control neural prosthetics neuroengineering neurology neurons neuroscience neurotechnology open open philanthropy parkinson's philanthropy planning principles project teaching psychiatry schizophrenia science simplicity stress stroke synthesis synthetic biology synthetic neurobiology tagging teaching technology review think thinking time time management tr35 traumatic brain injury .
godchaser Piano User Join Date: Jun 2007 Posts: 404

Thread Tools
Show Printable Version Email this Page
Display Modes
Linear Mode Switch to Hybrid Mode Switch to Threaded Mode

Currently Active Users Viewing This Thread: 1 (0 members and 1 guests)

Similar Threads
Thread	Thread Starter	Forum	Replies	Last Post
Playing with synthetic muscles after cancer	SeanP	Trumpet Discussion	17	02-15-2008 11:40 AM
Hetman Synthetic Oils	kingflair	Trumpet Discussion	11	12-27-2003 10:31 AM

Unleash Your Anger
Copyright 2006 TrumpetMaster.com	All times are GMT -4. The time now is 02:15 PM. Powered by vBadvanced CMPS v2.2.0/Links 1.01 Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.6.9 Copyright ©2000 - 2008, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd. Search Engine Optimization by vBSEO 3.0.0 RC8