Brown School of Engineering Assistant Professor David Borton has been named Research Biomedical Engineer, joining the Veterans Affairs Rehabilitation Research and Development Center for Neurorestoration and Neurotechnology. In his newest role, Borton and his lab will focus expertise on restoring function for veterans with spinal cord injury and brain disorders.
"Dr. Borton's wide-ranging expertise in neural recording, neural decoding and wireless neuroengineering brings additional strength to our focus areas on restoring consciousness, communication and mobility and on restoring affective and cognitive health," said Leigh Hochberg, MD, Ph.D. and Director of the Center for Neurorestoration and Neurotechnology (CfNN).
Borton's research enables basic science innovation through technological integration. He is engineering new tools for wireless neural recording and stimulation in order to untangle neuromotor disease states, and more generally to understand how these states are dynamically represented in the brain and spinal cord. Using these tools, he explores how motor processing in the brain evolves during long-term, naturalistic recording.
Borton received his undergraduate degree in Biomedical Engineering from Washington University in St. Louis in 2006, his doctorate in Biomedical Engineering from Brown University in 2012, and performed his post-doctoral training at the Ecole Polytechnique in Lausanne Switzerland (EPFL) under a Marie Curie International Fellowship. In 2015, Borton received the DARPA Young Faculty Award, and in 2016 was awarded an NIH Brain grant.
CfNN began with a June 2012 award from the Department of Veterans Affairs Rehabilitation Research and Development Service. The Center is a collaboration between the Providence VA Medical Center , Brown University, Butler Hospital, Lifespan, and Massachusetts General Hospital.