Nir Grossman

Biography

Nir is a research fellow at the Centre for Bio-Inspired Technology, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering. He received BSc in Physics from the Israeli Institute of Technology (Technion), MSc in Electromagnetic Engineering from the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg (TUHH), Germany, and PhD in Neuroscience, under the supervision of Dr. Patrick Degenaar and Professor Christopher Kennard, from the Department of Medicine at Imperial College London. Following his PhD, Nir was awarded the BBSRC (Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council) Enterprise Fellowship and he joint Professor Christofer Toumazou’s lab at the Institute of Biomedical Engineering at Imperial College London. After the completion of the BBSRC fellowship, he was awarded the Wellcome Trust MIT Fellowship and joint Professor Ed Boyden’s lab at MIT’s Media Lab and McGovern Institute for Brain Research and Professor Alvaro Pascual-Leone’s lab at Harvard’s Berenson-Allen Center for Noninvasive Brain Stimulation. Nir develops neuromodulatory interventions for brain disorders by pioneering new tools and principles to impact the disease pathology via direct modulation of the underlying aberrant neural activity. His research drives innovation through rigorous scientific exploration of common biophysical principles and rules underpinning the neural processing of electromagnetic stimulation, using natural bridges between advanced computational neuroscience and cutting-edge experiments, ranging from a single neuron cell to human behaviour. Nir’s work initially focused on optogenetic retinal prosthesis for patients who are blind due to the degeneration of their retina - the main cause of blindness in the developed countries. He used the then newly discovered Channelrhodopsin-2 (ChR2) to photosensitize the residual retinal cells and a novel light source to drive the photosensitized cells non-invasively. During his PhD and BBSRC fellowship at Imperial College London, in a series of studies that combined single-cell electrophysiology and neurodynamic modelling, Nir and his co-workers helped reveal the underlying principles that govern and limit the optogenetic control of neural activity. During that period, together with his co-workers, he also developed and validated a new stimulating tool to enable simultaneous optogenetic control over thousands of neurons. The paper describing the new tool was awarded Top Paper of the Year 2010 by the referees and readers of the Journal of Neural Engineering.

Research Interest

Neurotechnology