Carnegie Mellon University

Krishna V. Shenoy To Receive Andrew Carnegie Prize in Mind and Brain Sciences

September 26, 2018

Krishna V. Shenoy To Receive Andrew Carnegie Prize in Mind and Brain Sciences

By Stefanie Johndrow

Carnegie Mellon University will award the sixth annual Andrew Carnegie Prize in Mind and Brain Sciences to Krishna V. Shenoy, the Hong Seh and Vivian W. M. Lim Professor of Engineering at Stanford University. Shenoy directs the Stanford Neural Prosthetic Systems Lab and co-directs the Stanford Neural Prosthetics Translational Laboratory, which aims to help restore lost motor function to people with paralysis.

The Carnegie Prize, given by the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (CNBC) and funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, recognizes trailblazers in the mind and brain sciences whose research has helped advance the field and its applications. The CNBC will present the award to Shenoy at 4:30 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 18, in the Simmons Auditorium A, Tepper Building. As part of the award ceremony, Shenoy will present a talk on “Brain-machine Interfaces: From Basic Science and Engineering to Clinical Trials.”

“Krishna Shenoy is one of the luminaries of neuroscience. He has brought a variety of ideas, and technologies, from engineering to help advance our understanding of the way the brain plans and executes movement. He is also an exemplary mentor, who is widely admired in the community,” said Robert E. Kass, the Maurice Falk Professor of Statistics and Computational Neuroscience.

Shenoy’s neuroscience research investigates the neural basis of movement preparation and generation using a combination of electrophysiological, behavioral, computational and theoretical techniques. His neuroengineering research investigates the design of high-performance neural prosthetic systems, also known as brain-computer interfaces and brain-machine interfaces. These systems translate neural activity from the brain into control signals for prosthetic devices, which assist people with paralysis by restoring lost function

Shenoy has received a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award in the Biomedical Sciences, a McKnight Technological Innovations in Neurosciences Award, a National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director’s Pioneer Award, the 2010 Stanford University Postdoc Mentoring Award, and was selected as an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow and a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) College of Fellows. Shenoy serves on the Scientific Advisory boards of the University of Washington’s Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering (a National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center), CTRL-Labs Inc., MIND-X Inc. and Heal Inc. He is a consultant for Neuralink Corp.

“I am honored and humbled to receive, on behalf of my entire research group, the 2018 Andrew Carnegie Prize in Mind and Brain Science from my esteemed colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University,” Shenoy said.

Previous recipients of the Carnegie Prize are the NIH’s Nora Volkow and Leslie Ungerleider, University of Geneva’s Alexandre Pouget, MIT’s Ed Boyden and Novartis Institute for Biomedical Research’s Ricardo Dolmetsch.

A collaborative research center between CMU and the University of Pittsburgh, the CNBC focuses on neuroscience and has helped establish Carnegie Mellon and the Pittsburgh scientific communication as a world leader in brain and behavioral sciences. At CMU, the CNBC is administered by the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences.