Medical Engineering Distinguished Seminar Series, Professor Donhee Ham
For decades, neuroscience has wrestled with a tough trade-off: probe a handful of neurons with exquisite intracellular detail, or monitor a large population with only extracellular approximations. Precision or scale––never both. Our new intracellular microelectrode array (iMEA), powered by a silicon chip, breaks this divide. By massively parallelizing intracellular access, it delivers detail and scale together––opening the door to large-scale intracellular neuroscience (https://rdcu.be/eAU7n). Already, the iMEA has mapped over 70,000 plausible synaptic connections from over 2,000 cultured rat neurons, and we are now advancing it toward fully plug-and-play platforms for both in vitro and in vivo use. In this talk, I will share how this technology bridges the long-standing gap between scale and detail, and how it enables precision studies of population neural dynamics and functional synaptic cartography, as well as bold new directions in neuromorphic electronics ("brain-copy-and-paste"), wetware computing, and drug discovery.
Biography: Donhee Ham is John A. and Elizabeth S. Armstrong Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. He was also a Samsung Fellow from 2019 to 2024 and served as Deputy Head of Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, Samsung Electronics in 2024. Research website: https://donheehamlab.org. His publications relevant to this presentation on semiconductor-bio interfaces and machine intelligence include: Nature Biomed. Eng. 9, 1144 (2025), Nature 601, 211 (2022); Nature Electronics 4, 635 (2021); Nature Electronics 5, 519 (2022); Nature Biomed. Eng. 4, 232 (2020); and Nature Nano. 12, 460 (2017).
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