Amol Yadav Honored with NIH Director’s New Innovator Award

Dr. Amol Yadav, assistant professor in the Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering at UNC-Chapel Hill and NC State, was honored with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director’s New Innovator Award for his research in sensory augmentation. The prize honors extraordinary early-career researchers who are pursuing daring, highly inventive research endeavors, according to the NIH. This award will pay $2.33 million over five years and is part of their High-Risk, High-Reward Research Program.

The goal of Dr. Amol's award-funded study is to create technologies that improve sensory perception in order to aid in the rehabilitation of people with neurological illnesses. Brain-machine interfaces have been effectively employed in rehabilitation engineering to retrieve brain signals and regulate the motion of external prosthetic devices. Further research is necessary to develop and expand the real-time feedback between the user and the neuroprosthetic device. In order to enhance motor control and rehabilitation efforts, Amol's research suggests employing a special device interface to enhance, restore, amplify, and modify sensory perception signals.

In particular, Dr. Amol's research will investigate novel approaches to controlling signals between a neuroprosthetic device and the neurological system. Amol has suggested doing a feasibility study on patients who are undergoing spinal cord stimulator implantation for chronic pain. A spinal cord stimulator is a device that blocks pain signals from reaching the brain by stimulating nerves in the spinal cord with an electrical current. Without altering the patient's standard of care, the study will make use of FDA-approved spinal cord stimulators, which are now in use, to detect and analyze signal inputs and enhance sensory perception.