Maryam Shanechi

Shanechi was born in Iran and moved to Canada with her family when she was 16.[1][2] She received her bachelor's degree in engineering from the University of Toronto in 2004. She then moved to MIT, where she completed her master's degree in electrical engineering and computer science in 2006 and her PhD in 2011.[3] She completed a postdoc at Harvard Medical School before moving to the University of California, Berkeley, in 2012. She held a faculty position at Cornell University, before moving to the University of Southern California, where she is currently an assistant professor and Viterbi Early Career Chair within the USC Viterbi School of Engineering.[1][3][4][2]

While pursuing her graduate degree at MIT, Shanechi became interested in decoding the brain, the idea of reading out the original meaning from brain signals. She developed an algorithm to determine where a monkey wanted to point the cursor on a screen based on the animal's brain activity.[1][5] She later improved upon her work by including high-rate decoding, meaning the decoding happened over a few milliseconds, rather than every 100 milliseconds, which is the standard for traditional methods.

In 2013 she developed a brain decoding method that could help automatically control the amount of anesthesia that is to be administered to a patient.[6][7] Her team, which included colleagues from Massachusetts General Hospital and Massachusetts Institute of Technology was able to control the depth of the medically-induced coma in rodents automatically based on their brain activity.[6][7][8][9]

Shanechi is also interested in the application of neural decoding algorithms to psychiatric disorders, such as PTSD and depression.[2][10][11] Her research team developed a method to decipher the mood of a person from their brain activity.[12][13] They measured the brain activity of seven patients who had electrodes implanted in their brain to monitor epilepsy.[11] The patients answered questions about their mood while the electrodes were implanted. Using the data about the mood and the brain activity, Shanechi's lab was able to match the two together and decipher which brain activity was related to which mood.[11][12] The paper on this work was awarded the 3rd prize in the International BCI Awards.[14] In the future, Shanechi wants to develop this technique in order to stimulate the brain automatically when a change in mood is detected.[1][15]