My talk is today and you’re all invited!

Okay so I wanted to update everyone on how my first lecture went yesterday since I only had a few short days to throw everything together and it was a mad panic to the end. Unfortunately we cannot go into detail today! That’s because today is my “I’m giving a talk” talk (which I wrote about here). It’s free to watch, my talk is roughly four minutes long and is a nice little rundown of some of the work I do. So today I figure I will go into a bit of detail and should you be so inclined to attend you’ll get the chance to chat with me in person about my work! Yep, I’m breaking anonymity yet again, but it’s for a good reason.

My research has taken a wild and winding path in the past three years since I started my PhD. I want to, and will always want to, improve accessibility for people. Prosthetics are my passion and I still to this day build them! Shameless plug here, if you need one for a specific function drop me a line, I work at cost or free! It’s my little gift to the world. So my undergrad and Masters were on control theory and biomimetic design. I got good at both then decided to abandon that ship to learn how to interface with a person so now I’m at a brain-machine interface lab with my main-PI.

But wait there’s always more! My Co-PI does research in non-invasive spinal stimulation and since I like living at the intersection of fields and tying things together in interesting ways I do a combination of both. Since my degree research is still very hush, hush, I can talk about some of the work I’m doing that will support my PhD thesis and that is the topic of the talk I’m giving today!

For those interested in attending you need to go to the 2021 BRAIN Initiative website (here) and set up an account, it’s pretty painless and it took me less than a minute to do. My talk will happen today at 2:30pm eastern time in the Trainee Highlight Awards – Concurrent Session 3 “virtual room” and I’m one of 30 trainee highlight awards (out of roughly 300 so not too bad!). My talk is pre-recorded, but I will be around for a live Q&A afterwards for several hours today!

The title of my talk is “EEG assessment of central sensory network coding during non-invasive spinal stimulation” and I’m poster number 9023

This of course means you’ll get to see my full name and university affiliation (not that I haven’t given that away before) among other things. I attempted to make my talk as accessible as possible so you don’t need to have a background in neuroscience, neuroengineering, or even regular engineering to understand the significance of the work. If you decide to attend and you find yourself confused or have questions afterwards I’ll be hanging around to answer them so don’t hesitate to come by and say hi!

I would love to meet some of you, even if it’s just virtually. As always the support of my readers has been a huge help to me both mentally and physically. Without the constant stream of support (and sometimes flood) I would basically have no one. I’ve managed to crowd-source my very own virtual family around here. Being selected for this is as much a win for me as it is for all of you! Thank you all for the countless hours of reading, comments, likes, and emails. I’ve been incredibly lucky in life and you all have had a hand in that. I see you all and even though I can’t thank you all by name, please know you mean the world to me!

I hope to get to thank some of you in person, so please stop by and say hi. You’ll get the rare chance to put a face and name to the literal crazy person who runs this blog. See you then!!