Nottingham leads training programme in Neural Engineering

Professor Stephen Coombes, a lecturer in the School of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Nottingham has been awarded a €5.2m grant by the European Commission through its Marie Curie Initial Training Network scheme to investigate ‘Neural Engineering Transformative Technologies’ (NETT).

Neural Engineering is an inherently new discipline that brings together engineering, physics, neuroscience and mathematics to design and develop brain-computer interface systems, cognitive computers and neural prosthetics.

Professor Coombes leads a Europe-wide consortium of 18 universities, research institutes and private companies who together will host 17 PhD students and 3 postdoctoral researchers over the next 4 years.

The team at Nottingham will use powerful techniques from applied mathematics to aid in the understanding of two key challenges. The first relates to ‘synthetic cognition’ (interfacing computers and biological systems) in small networks of living neurons connected to a virtual environment, built and designed by Dr Noah Russell in the Neurophotonics Research Laboratory. The second supports Dr Chris Sumner from the MRC Institute of Hearing Research on-site at the University of Nottingham, working on developing new methods for decoding the representation of sound in the brain. Both projects will use tools from dynamical systems theory to understand the rich computational abilities of networks of spiking neurons (modelling the behaviour and interactivity of neurons that activate only above a certain threshold).

Professor Coombes, said: “This training programme will be the one of the first of its kind in Europe, and will help deliver a new breed of scientists capable of developing transformative technologies based upon ideas from neuroscience. In the long term the mathematics of complex neural engineered systems will have an impact on almost every aspect of daily human life, including the development of neural prosthetics, next generation computing via synthetic cognition, and brain-machine interfaces.”