Realizing Personalized Noninvasive Brain Stimulation Treatments

Wednesday, October 18, 2017

4:00 PM-5:30 PM

BIOMED Seminar

Title:
Realizing Personalized Noninvasive Brain Stimulation Treatments

Speaker:
John D. Medaglia, PhD
Assistant Professor
Applied Cognitive and Brain Sciences
Department of Psychology
Drexel University

Details:
To date, one form of noninvasive brain stimulation (NBS) has been FDA-approved for the treatment of depression. NBS is currently being applied in off-label clinical, research, and community contexts to influence virtually every conceivable cognitive and emotional function. However, the optimistic horizon for NBS in the emerging era of “precision medicine” remains unclear.

In this talk, I argue that most of this problem results from a basic lack of application of first principles approaches commonly applied in bioengineering. Fortunately, this means that conceptually simple solutions could begin to solve this problem via collaboration between applied scientists and engineers. I describe several potential low-cost approaches to combining NBS, online brain monitoring, and behavioral measurement that could provide much-needed insight into basic principles governing treatment responses to TMS.

Biosketch:
Professor Medaglia is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Drexel University and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Neurology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a 2015 recipient of the NIH Director’s Early Independence Award, which currently supports his research investigating control-theory based approaches to enhance personalized brain stimulation treatments.

Dr. Medaglia combines advanced network analysis, behavioral paradigms, and noninvasive neural stimulation to approach this goal. More broadly, he applies bioinformatics approaches to identify and classify neurological phenotypes, studies how human intuitions about appropriate uses of neural stimulation, and examines ethical and legal issues related to cognitive trade-offs in applied brain stimulation.

Contact Information

Ken Barbee
215-895-1335
barbee@drexel.edu