Maryam Shanechi

Maryam M. Shanechi
Born	1980 or 1981 (age 42–43) Iran
Alma mater	University of Toronto, MIT

Maryam M. Shanechi is an Iranian neuroengineer. She studies ways of decoding the brain's activity to control brain-machine interfaces. She was honored as one of MIT Technology Review's Innovators under 35 in 2014 and one of the Science News 10 scientists to watch in 2019.

Early life and career

Shanechi was born in Iran and moved to Canada with her family when she was 16. She got her bachelor's in Engineering from the University of Toronto in 2004. She then moved to MIT, where she completed her master's degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 2006 and her PhD in 2011. She completed a postdoc at Harvard Medical School before moving to the University of California, Berkeley in 2012. She held a faculty position at Cornell University, before moving to the University of Southern California, where she is currently an assistant professor and Viterbi Early Career Chair within the USC Viterbi School of Engineering.

Research

During her graduate degree at MIT, Shanechi got interested in decoding the brain, the idea of reading out the original meaning from brain signals. She developed an algorithm to determine from the brain acitvity of a monkey where the animal wanted to point the cursor on a screen. She later improved upon her work by including high-rate decoding, meaning the decoding happened over a few millisecond, rather than every 100 millisecond, which is the standard for traditional methods.

In 2013 she developed a brain decoding method that could help automatically control the amount of anesthesia that is to be administered to a patient. They were able to control the depth of the medically-induced coma in rodents automatically based on their brain activity.

Shanechi is also interested in the application of neural decoding algorithms to psychiatric disorders, such as PTSD and depression. Her lab developed a method to decipher the mood of a person from their brain activity. They measured the brain activity of seven patients who had electrodes implanted in their brain to monitor epilepsy. The patients answered questions about their mood while the electrodes were implanted. Using the data about the mood and the brain activity, Shanechi's lab was able to match the two together and decipher what brain activity was related to what mood. The paper on this work was awarded the 3rd prize in the International BCI Awards. In the future Shanechi wants to develop this technique in order to stimulate the brain automatically when a change in mood is detected.

Awards

• Science News 10 Scientists to Watch, 2019
• Popular Science Brilliant 10, 2015
• MIT Techonology Review Innovators Under 35, 2014

Selected publications

Her publications include:

• Shanechi, Maryam; Hu, Rollin; Marissa, Powers; Wornell, Gregory; Brown, Emery; Williams, Ziv (2012). "Neural population partitioning and a concurrent brain-machine interface for sequential motor function". Nature Neuroscience.
• Shanechi, Maryam M.; Chemali, Jessica J.; Liberman, Max; Solt, Ken; Brown, Emery N. (2013-10-31). "A Brain-Machine Interface for Control of Medically-Induced Coma". PLOS Computational Biology. 9 (10): e1003284. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003284. ISSN 1553-7358. PMC 3814408. PMID 24204231.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: PMC format (link) CS1 maint: unflagged free DOI (link)
• Shanechi, Maryam M.; Orsborn, Amy L.; Moorman, Helene G.; Gowda, Suraj; Dangi, Siddharth; Carmena, Jose M. (2017). "Rapid control and feedback rates enhance neuroprosthetic control". Nature Communications. 8 (1): 1–10. doi:10.1038/ncomms13825. ISSN 2041-1723.
• Sani, Omid G.; Yang, Yuxiao; Lee, Morgan B.; Dawes, Heather E.; Chang, Edward F.; Shanechi, Maryam M. (2018). "Mood variations decoded from multi-site intracranial human brain activity". Nature Biotechnology. 36 (10): 954–961. doi:10.1038/nbt.4200. ISSN 1546-1696.