Guest Lectures Build Bridges in Neurosystems Engineering

Solving major health, national security and societal problems is a large agenda, but Sandia National Labs' Principal Scientist and VP Gerold Yonas and ECE Prof. Edl Schamiloglu believe that building a link between systems engineering and recent advances in neuroscience will make groundbreaking progress in all of these areas.

Yonas and Schamiloglu are closing this cross-disciplinary gap by teaching a graduate-level neurosystems engineering course, ECE 595, offered spring semester both on the UNM campus and through ITV at Los Alamos National Lab and Sandia National Laboratories. The course meets Mondays and Wednesdays, 5:30-6:45 p.m., from Jan. 21 through May 6.

The course is taught primarily by guest lecturers who are experts in this emerging field. The 2008 spring-semester course, co-led by Yonas and Rex Jung, a neuropsychologist and research scientist at the Mind Research Network and a UNM professor of neurology and psychology, invited professionals from such diverse organizations as the Santa Fe Institute, National Institutes of Health, Krasnow Institute and DARPA.

Neurosystems engineering applies neuroscience, sensor and information systems, psychology, engineering, modeling and simulation, health care, and ethics. Connecting these complex disciplines with practical systems solutions is a challenge. Professionals in these various disciplines all have their own languages, definitions, and even axes to grind, so bridging the gaps can be a major undertaking.

A physicist and engineer, Dr.Yonas became interested in these issues when he ran the Advanced Concepts Group at Sandia and found that the weak link in many complex technology-based systems solutions was not the technology, but rather the key person or groups of people who used the technology.

NE seeks to better understand physiological brain signals and patterns of connections that might be correlated with and predictive of thoughts and behavior. So the course addresses problems, solutions and engineering/science challenges related to a variety of topics, including accelerated learning, creativity, stress, deception detection, sleep, traumatic brain injury, post-traumatic stress, and decision-making when it is affected by the high stress of ambiguity, confusion and time urgency.

Most of the lectures during last spring's course transitioned quickly from a presentation into a discussion between the lecturer and the members of the class. One speaker, Eric Wasserman from the NIH, lectured on the application of noninvasive electrical brain stimulation to transiently change brain function. Another topic has been stress and how to both harness and manage it more effectively. NE could devise applications to identify soldiers at risk prior to deployment, develop mitigating strategies for use in high stress conditions, and ensure that best-practice techniques are available to triage soldiers into personalized treatment plans if needed.

Another potential application of NE is in deception detection, which is a field that has mostly relied upon the polygraph, a 70-year-old technology that many question. With advances in brain functional measurements, researchers should be able to better understand what parts of the brain are calling the shots during deception, and under what circumstances.

For information about ECE 595, Neurosystems Engineering, contact Dr. Schamiloglu at edl@ece.unm.edu or Dr. Yonas at gyonas@sandia.gov. Dr. Yonas is also a member of ECE's Advisory Council.