Penn Engineering’s Flavia Vitale’s work developing devices that help people living with brain disorders has earned her a CAREER award, which will support her lab’s research in materials and devices that interface with different chemical and electrical signals inside the brain.
Neurological disorders such as epilepsy, Alzheimers, Parkinson’s and certain forms of dementia are the leading cause of disability and second-leading cause of disease worldwide. These disorders disproportionately affect low-resourced communities due to lack of access to specialized healthcare, and many of these complex diseases lack curative solutions.
Vitale’s multidisciplinary skills are what allow her to develop devices that help people living with brain disorders. The CAREER Award is now helping her further apply those skills and actualize some of her first long-term research projects at Penn.
“This CAREER Award will support my lab’s current research in leveraging innovation in materials and fabrication approaches to develop devices that are able to interface with and control different chemical and electrical signals inside the brain,” she says.
The brain is multimodal; it operates through both chemical and electrical interactions. Current seizure-suppressing devices are only speaking the electrical language to talk to the brain, completely neglecting the chemical communication.
In contrast, Vitale’s work will combine the chemical and electrical languages of the brain together with her expertise in nanofabrication to design a new device.
“To create a device that is minimally invasive, highly effective, and that can interact with the multiple chemicals and electrical currents in our body, we must choose our materials carefully,” she says. “Right now my group is turning to electrically conductive nanomaterials known as MXenes to do this work.”
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