Nicholas Scott Card, Ph.D.

Nicholas Scott Card is an A. P. Giannini postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Neurological Surgery at the University of California, Davis. He works in the Neuroprosthetics Lab, which is co-led by Sergey Stavisky and David Brandman. Card earned both a bachelor’s degree (2016) and a doctorate (2022) in bioengineering from the University of Pittsburgh, where he received training in neural engineering, systems neuroscience and computational neuroscience. His current research interests are centered around the development of a brain-computer interface to restore the ability to communicate to clinical trial participants with neurodegenerative diseases or brain injuries that prevent them from being able to speak. Card has been awarded multiple research fellowships during his undergraduate and graduate research career from the Center for Neuroscience at the University of Pittsburgh (CNUP) and the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (CNBC), which is a joint program between the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University. As a senior graduate student, Card helped mentor younger graduate students within his lab.

Principal Investigator: Sergey Stavisky

Fellow: Plyfaa Suwanamalik-Murphy

Undergraduate Fellow Project: Developing a brain computer interface to restore speech to anarthric people

The overall goal of this project is to develop a brain-computer interface that can restore the ability to communicate to people who have lost the ability to speak. Toward this goal, we aim to surgically implant neural recording devices into the brain of a clinical trial participant and then accurately decode their neural signals into words during attempted speech. This project is large in scope and combines principles of neural engineering, systems neuroscience, computational neuroscience, computer engineering and machine learning. There are a wide variety of sub-projects within this scope that would be appropriate for an undergraduate researcher of any experience level. Potential subprojects include processing and analyzing human neural data, developing a pipeline for facial tracking during experimental sessions, helping to create a realistic neural simulator to test out the decoder, and more. I will work with the SURFiN fellow to choose an appropriate subproject for them based on their preferences, experience and skill level.