The last four years have been an incredible pleasure. I consider it to be an incredible privilege to have been able to do the work that I did here at Columbia with Mark Churchland, Mike Shadlen, and Daniel Wolpert. I have gotten to see this work impact a number of other researchers, and the consistent support of the Grossman Center throughout my training enabled me to take on ambitious and risky projects that didn’t cleanly fall under the purview of any ongoing grant-funded work. I deeply appreciate their support throughout this period and hope they can see just how impactful their generous contributions have been to the field of nonhuman primate neuroscience.

There are two research developments in the last year that I am particularly excited about. Over the past several years, I have continued to develop and refine a system for recording larger populations of neurons from multiple targets in a rhesus macaque brain using high-density silicon probes. The paper detailing this technology is available now in preprint and is in review at Nature Neuroscience. The system I developed for simultaneous multi-area recordings is now being used by a number of other labs and researchers around the world. I have worked to help a number of colleagues get up and running to perform their own experiments using this technology, and it’s proven safe and effective for radically scaling up the number of neurons that we can simultaneously record – ultimately enabling new classes of science. I am also working with external collaborators to transition a similar approach for use with clinical patients, which we believe will mark a sea-change in how we’re able to approach neuroscientific questions with appropriate scale, rigor, and complexity.

Figure 1 - Rendering of the high-density insertion system. This configuration is capable of inserting eight Neuropixels-NHP v1.0 probes, for a total of 3072 simultaneous recording channels.

I’m driven to continue developing novel technologies to accelerate neuroscience and share these to enable other scientists to do their work more effectively. In the near term, this means I have two goals: 1) to disseminate the technologies for ultra large-scale neural recording in primates, and 2) to translate this technology for multi-day recording in human patients. I’ve begun work in both directions, by building an open-source repository for disseminating designs for nonhuman primate recording systems and working directly with a number of individual researchers. Here at Columbia, I’ve helped Saurabh Vyas and Roberto Gulli implement their experiments. Using this approach, they have been able to collect data that would have never been possible even a year or two ago, to address fundamental questions that address neural mechanisms of planning, cognition, spatial navigation, and motor control.

The field of nonhuman primate neuroscience has historically been challenged by the lack of advanced tools that neuroscientists who are working with rodents and other smaller model organisms have access to. By funding this collaborative work to revolutionize the methods and techniques for NHP research, the Grossman Center is altering the landscape of the types of scientific questions we can feasibly address. Experiments that used to be impractical or untenable have become so easy that we can complete them in several days. What used to take months or years we can now do in a few sessions. That has enabled us to become far more ambitious and focus on interesting behaviors, and riskier questions that might not work out since the iteration time has become so much faster. We are just starting to see the rest of the NHP experimental world begin to adopt these techniques now, and I anticipate that in the next few years, a deluge of interesting scientific breakthroughs will follow.

Without theory, our neuroscientific data has little value. Columbia and the Grossman Center represent a uniquely effective pairing of experimentalists and theoreticians. My recent scientific work required a combination of dynamical system theory, innovations in neurosurgical techniques, and novel technologies. Collectively, this is more academic and intellectual breadth than any one scientist can bring to the table. The Grossman Center supported a uniquely interdisciplinary and diverse group of researchers to work on a collaboration that is hard to imagine happening at many other universities.