 Matt's fossil is our next speaker from electrical and computer engineering his title long-term installation of active electronics embedded in compliant neural probes Your brain is your body's most important organ and figuring out how brains work is one of today's major scientific questions The implications cover a whole range of medical conditions from sensory loss like blindness and deafness to neurological conditions like depression and schizophrenia Brain-computer interfaces can help not only understand how does the brain work, but also provide paths for treating these conditions if Their their promise is so great, then what prevents a wider adoption of brain computer interfaces in research or medicine The major issue is the tools that we use to interface with the brain In order to capture the information generated by individual neurons probes have to be inserted into the brain Typical probes used today are essentially silicon needles with metal electrodes at the tip The issue is that because the brain shakes a little bit inside the skull the area of the brain around the needle gets damaged over time And so the probe gradually loses its capability to detect the neural information In order to address this we've developed a flexible probe shown at the top made out of a bi-compatible polymer called periline Which doesn't damage the brain? But one typical issue with the polymer materials that people use to make flexible probes is that they degrade in water and Water makes up about 75% of the brain So in order to make long-lasting flexible probes, we have to use combinations of materials as shown schematically in the middle We use periline as a structural layer to define the body of the probe and we use a metal layer To define the electrode and carry the electric signal and between the two we had a thin ceramic layer In order to keep the metal protected even after the polymer layer was degraded But silicon probes have another advantage because silicon is also The material the base material for making micro-electronic chips And so chips can directly be built into Silicon probes in order to improve the signal quality or increase the electrode density Essentially make the probe more efficient at at communicating neural information None of that is possible with polymer probes not directly and so I've also developed a method to Integrate silicon chips into polymer probes First by thinning the chips and then by attaching them to the to the probe during the fabrication process To the metal layer before adding the ceramic and and polymer protective layers. These are this is what the bottom picture shows and this this method um compounds the benefits of flexible probes and active electronic chips In order to yield a long lasting and highly effective neural interface And so it's our hope that um these flexible multi-layer probes with embedded active chips can provide durable and high quality neural interfaces and Unlock the potential of brain computer interfacing Improving the lives of millions Thank you