Meet Giacomo Valle – Neurotechnology researcher and lead author of a newly study published in Science

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Giacomo Valle

Giacomo Valle, Assistant Professor in Bionics has been working at the Department of Electrical Engineering at Chalmers for just over six months and is enthusiastic about his research with brain-computer interfaces and individuals with intracortical implants. Giacomo is the lead author of a new study published in Science and he also featured with a paper in The Lancet Digital Health. Listen to him explain his main research focus and his background.

You are currently featured with two papers and were also recently interviewed in Nature about your research. Can you tell us more about your primary area and why you chose to focus on that in particular?

“The primary focus for the research team is to develop sensorimotor neuroprostheses for people with neurological diseases.

The overall scientific goal is to investigate how the natural human sensorimotor system is encoding relevant information for expressing flexible behavior and to create models able to unveil the underlying neural mechanisms.

The overall biomedical goal is to engineer neuroprosthetic devices leveraging how understanding of the natural biological system to improve the medical condition of people with neurological impairments.

We are now part of the technological and medical ecosystem of Goteborg.

I decided to focus on these topics because neurotechnology will be literally part of us in the near future and the market is growing very fast. It is one of the most promising areas of research in the biomedical field aiming to help millions of patients worldwide.”

What do you hope your research will lead to?
“I hope my research would help people with sensorimotor impairments as well as unveil the underlying mechanisms of the sensorimotor functions in humans.”

Can you tell us about your background?

“I completed my Ph.D. in Biorobotics at Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Pisa and EPFL Lausanne in 2019. My dissertation establishes a fundamental new construction for neural engineering combining neuroscientific and engineering-based approaches inspired by nature (biomimetics) to improve patients’ quality of life. I then continued my career at ETH Zurich working in interfacing biomimetic sensory feedback devices based on neural stimulation. I indeed developed and tested the first real-time neuroprosthetic device, exploiting implantable neurotechnology, for people with leg amputation. Finally, I moved into one of very few neuroprosthetics labs working with patients implanted with electrodes in motor and sensory cortex at University of Chicago. I led scientists to design novel strategies to communicate with the human brain using biomimetic stimulation to connect paralyzed patients directly to extracorporeal robotic limbs.

I have research experience in brain-computer interface, rehabilitation, bionics and neuroengineering, leveraging basic science knowledge about sensory and motor processing in humans and engineering principles to design new approaches to bidirectionally interact with the nervous system exploiting biomimetics. My vision is to lead a research program employing both experimental and computational methods to design and develop more effective neurotechnology.

Chalmers collaborate with the Cortical Bionics Research Group, a research consortium with University of Pittsburgh, University of Chicago and Northwestern University. The network aims to develop bionic devices to help people with paralysis.  The mission of the Cortical Bionics Research Group is to build next-generation intracortical Brain-Computer Interfaces that enable dexterous control of bionic hands by people with paralysis or amputation. 5 participants have been implanted so far, 2 in Chicago and 3 in Pittsburgh. The work just published includes the 2 participants in Chicago, I led the study in close collaboration with Charles M. Greenspon (neuroscientist), Peter Warnke (neurosurgeon) and prof. Sliman J. Bensmaia at University of Chicago. Prof. Bensmaia was the principal investigator of the trial in Chicago until he unexpectedly passed away in August 2023. Prof. Bensmaia rigorously investigated these features of natural touch in both humans and monkeys during his career. He inspired and pushed us to leverage what we learned from touch encoding to shape new ICMS paradigms in the context of human BCI.”

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Giacomo Valle
  • Assistant Professor, Systems and Control, Electrical Engineering