AMAX Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering studies potential new devices to provide treatment for neural disorders
RLE welcomes Assistant Professor Polina O. Anikeeva who has recently joined the Research Laboratory of Electronics. Prof. Anikeeva’s expertise is in optogenetics and hybrid optoelectronics, and she is particularly engaged with the development of novel devices to treat neural disorders. Anikeeva’s work is motivated by the fact that the clinical treatment of many neural disorders is frequently hampered by invasive, cumbersome and sometimes ineffective methods. Examples include the deep brain stimulation in Parkinson’s patients, which requires risky surgery to implant an electrode; and heart arrhythmia treatment, which is entirely dependent on the surgical implantation of a pacemaker. “We are very excited to have Polina join RLE, I expect Polina’s research to benefit from interactions with members of our Multiscale Bioengineering and Biophysics theme, as she seeks to advance the frontiers of brain-device interfaces” said Yoel Fink RLE Director.
Prof. Anikeeva did her postdoctoral work with Karl Deisseroth at the Department of Bioengineering at Stanford. Prior to this, she completed her doctoral work at MIT while working in Prof. Vladimir Bulovic’s Laboratory of Organic Electronics and Optics, where she worked on the design and characterization of efficient multi-color LEDs based on organic materials and colloidal semiconductor quantum dots; energy transfer; and the physical modeling of hybrid organic-quantum dot optoelectronic devices. Going forward, her work centers on working with nanoscale materials and devices for minimally-invasive approaches to treatment of neurological disorders and, further, with the development of implantable devices for simultaneous stimulation and recording from neurons, thus enabling a direct manipulation of neural circuits.