An NYU Shanghai Amgen Scholar Dreams of Bionic Limbs

From a young age, Valeria longed to change the world. “I wanted to be a teacher or a researcher. I thought they were respectable jobs that allow people to contribute to society and impact human life,” says Valeria. She first discovered her interest in biology and neuroscience as a high school student. Once she took the Behavioral and Integrative Neuroscience course and the Interaction Lab at NYU Shanghai, she decided to explore her interest and determine how she could best impact society.

“Behavioral and Integrative Neuroscience was a very interactive class focusing on the computational process of neuroscience: how the memory functions and also how our mind presents information,” she explains. “And I became interested in those processes and also the algorithms behind them. Then through the Interaction Lab, I got interested in electrical engineering and turning a creative idea into a real model.”

Because NYU Shanghai students don’t select majors until the end of their sophomore year, Valeria had time to explore all of these interests and come to an important conclusion. “I realized my ultimate goal is to become a neural engineer, like designing bionic limbs that patients can control with their minds. After graduation, I plan to pursue a master’s in Biomedical Engineering to further combine my interests in neuroscience and electrical engineering.”

Research experience is an important step for Valeria on the way to engineering bionic limbs. While her Amgen Scholars Program research project was postponed because of COVID-19 travel restrictions, summer 2023 will still hold opportunities. She is eager to explore neuroengineering topics like biomolecular interactions with nanoelectronic devices or potential therapeutic approaches for neurodegenerative diseases. In the meantime, the NYU Shanghai junior found another opportunity at the Zhejiang University Medical Center.

Valeria’s research there aimed to help people with paralysis communicate. “I worked with Dr. Hao Yaoyao to collect data from people with paraplegia. We asked them to write a Chinese character in their minds,” she explains. “I used MATLAB to do some spike sorting, and I trained the computer to learn the patterns of neural activities and predict which letter a patient was writing. I also tried to reconstruct the Chinese character based on the neural activity data we collected.”

Valeria learned a lot about research, experiment design, and data collection and analysis. “And electrophysiology is the most basic subject in brain–computer interfacing. So no matter which direction I choose in the future, this experience laid a solid foundation for me.”