Dr. Damiano Giuseppe Barone

University of Cambridge, UK, Division of Neurosurgery, Department of Clinical Neurosciences

Damiano Giuseppe Barone is a Clinical Lecturer in neurosurgery with an interest in clinical translation of implantable neural interface technologies. He received his medical degree from the University of Naples ‘Federico II’ (Italy) in 2009, completing a research thesis on the anatomy of endoscopic skull base surgery. He has been training as a specialist neurosurgeon between Liverpool and Cambridge, with a particular focus in peripheral and skull base surgery. In 2019, he was awarded a PhD in Clinical Neurosciences at University of Cambridge, sponsored by the Wellcome Trust Translational Medicine and Therapeutics PhD Programme. As part of his PhD, he looked at novel therapeutic strategies for the treatment of foreign body reaction to implanted peripheral nerve neural interfaces. His current research focuses on implantable technologies for regeneration, restoration, and rehabilitation of the nervous system.

Prof. George Malliaras

University of Cambridge, UK, Electrical Engineering Division, Department of Engineering

George Malliaras is the Prince Philip Professor of Technology at the University of Cambridge. He received a PhD from the University of Groningen, the Netherlands and did a postdoc at the IBM Almaden Research Centre, USA. Before joining Cambridge, he was a faculty member at Cornell University in the USA, where he also served as the Director of the Cornell NanoScale Facility, and at the School of Mines in France. His research has been recognized with awards from the New York Academy of Sciences, the US National Science Foundation, and DuPont, and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Linköping in Sweden. He is a Fellow of the Materials Research Society and of the Royal Society of Chemistry and serves as Deputy Editor of Science Advances.

Dr. Christopher Proctor

University of Cambridge, UK, Electrical Engineering Division, Department of Engineering

Dr. Proctor leads the Bionic Systems Group in the Engineering Department at the University of Cambridge. He received a B.Sc. in Interdisciplinary Physics from the University of Michigan in 2008. Following two years as a general scientist at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, he earned a PhD in Materials from the University of California, Santa Barbara where he investigated loss mechanisms in organic photovoltaics (2015). Subsequently, Chris was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from Whitaker International to develop implantable bioelectronic devices for treating neurological disorders in the Bioelectronics Department at the Ecole des Mines de St Etienne. He then joined the University of Cambridge as a Research Associate and Borysiewicz Biomedical Sciences Fellow. In 2020, Chris started as a BBSRC David Phillips Fellow and group leader in the Engineering Department.

Dr. Alejandro Carnicer-Lombarte

University of Cambridge, UK, Electrical Engineering Division, Department of Engineering

Dr. Alejandro Carnicer-Lombarte is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Cambridge, UK. He received his PhD in Clinical Neurosciences from the University of Cambridge in 2018, studying the link between mechanics and implant rejection, and developing chronically-stable soft neural implants. Since then, he joined the Bioelectronics laboratory, led by Prof. George Malliaras, where his research focuses on the development of implantable brain and nerve interfaces to bypass nervous system injury and restore sensorimotor function. As part of his research, Dr. Carnicer-Lombarte combines electrophysiology and surgical implantation into rodent models with thin-film device fabrication techniques.