Copying Brain

MTL Seminar Series
to
Location
34-401 (Grier Room)
Open to
MTL Community

Speaker: Donhee Ham, Harvard University

Bio: Donhee Ham is Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Physics and EE at Harvard and a Samsung Fellow. He earned BS in physics from Seoul National U (SNU). Following a military service, he went to Caltech for graduate training. There he worked in LIGO under Prof. Barish in physics, and later obtained a PhD in EE winning the Wilts Prize for the best EE thesis. His other experiences/recognitions include IBM Watson, distinguished visiting professorship at SNU, IEEE conference committees (e.g., ISSCC), distinguished lecturer for IEEE SSC Society, associate editor for IEEE TBioCAS, IBM faculty fellowship, and MIT TR35. His intellectual focus includes neuro-electronic interface, neuromorphic processor, quantum devices, NMR technology, and integrated circuits.

Abstract: Massively parallel, intracellular recording of a large number of neurons across a network is a great technological pursuit in neurobiology, but it has not been achieved. The intracellular recording by the Nobel Prize winning patch clamp boasts unparalleled sensitivity that can measure synaptic events, but it is too bulky to scale into a dense array: only ~10 parallel patch recordings have so far been possible. The microelectrode array can record from many more neurons, but this extracellular technique has too low a sensitivity to tap into synaptic activities. I will share our recent breakthrough, a silicon chip that massively parallelizes the intracellular recording from thousands of connected mammalian neurons. I will also discuss the application of this unprecedented tool in fundamental and applied neurobiology (functional connectome mapping and high-throughput screening), and in copying biological neuronal networks for machine intelligence.