Electrical and Computer Engineering

In 2019, sitting in his office running computer simulations, Chaitanya Goswami, a Ph.D. student in Carnegie Mellon’s electrical and computer engineering department, noticed something that seemed too good to be true. The current patterns he had designed for focused non-invasive stimulation of the brain seemed to perform better than expected. It is well known that the skull disperses currents, reducing focus attained in the brain. Surprisingly, even when Chaitanya removed the skull in his simulations, the current pattern seemed as focused as with a skull.

“The skull became electrically transparent,” said Goswami. “I thought this was an error. These simulations, after all, take a lot of pieces to work together and small errors can have big implications.”

To get to these simulations, Chaitanya had hand-derived equations for how current in the brain can be described for an injected current pattern in the scalp. Chaitanya is a member of a team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, who received a $11 million grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), to design a noninvasive neural interface that can be used as a wearable device for clinical applications and brain-machine interfacing.

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