Nitish Thakor

Dr. Nitish Thakor is a professor of biomedical engineering and neurology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He also has an appointment in the Johns Hopkins Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He conducts research in the fields of Biomedical Instrumentation, Neuroengineering, Neurprosthesis, and Brain-Machine Interface. Dr. Thakor directs the Laboratory for Neuroengineering and is also the director of the NIH Training Grant on Neuroengineering. Presently he is also a co-director of the Carnegie Center at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Previously, for 10 years he founded and led an Institute, SINAPSE, focused on neurotechnologies, at the National University of Singapore. He is actively engaged in developing international scientific programs, collaborative exchanges, tutorials, and conferences in the field of biomedical and Neuroengineering. Dr. Thakor teaches Principles of Design of Medical Instrumentation and Rehabilitation Engineering courses and directs laboratories both in engineering school and the medical school engaged in many sensors, devices, and technologies through design, development, and experimentation, as well as clinical translation. For more than a decade Dr. Thakor collaborated and contributed to a project on “Revolutionizing Prosthesis, in collaboration with a multi-university consortium funded by DARPA. They developed the next-generation neurally controlled upper limb prosthesis. Presently, his team is developing both noninvasive and invasive neural and muscle interfaces, novel human-centered prostheses, sensors, and machine intelligence in the neuroprosthesis system. He received his undergraduate degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, in Bombay, India. He earned both a M.S. in biomedical engineering and a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. After 2 years as a faculty at Northwestern University, Dr. Thakor joined the Johns Hopkins faculty in 1983. Dr. Thakor is a co-author of more than 450 refereed journal papers, 20 patents, author of a comprehensive 4 volume Handbook of Neuroengineering. He has previously served as the editor-in-chief of Medical and Biological Engineering and Computing and IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering. In addition, Dr. Thakor is a recipient of a Research Career Development Award from the National Institutes of Health and a Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation and is a Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering, IEEE, Founding Fellow of the Biomedical Engineering Society, and Fellow of International Federation of Medical and Biological Engineering. He has been elected as a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors.