Northwestern University is a private institution founded in 1851 that includes two campuses: a 25-acre campus in Chicago, and a 240-acre campus in Evanston, a suburb just north of Chicago. Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine and the world-renowned Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago provide clinical expertise that complement the strong research focus of the university. The McCormick school of engineering recently began a thrust in Neural Engineering, which seeks to extend, develop, and apply basic knowledge of nervous systems into useful technology, including bio-inspired sensing, control, and movement systems.
Main tasks
The school of engineering at NU will play a key role in developing hardware and software models of whisking behaviour and early sensory processing, work on vestibular and whisker integration, and perform cerebellar electrophysiology to investigate candidate computational algorithms.
Research experience
The school of engineering has been studying the mechanics and neurobiology of active sensing behaviour for the last four years. The main research goal has been to quantify the spatiotemporal structure of incoming data to the whisker array and test hypotheses in hardware (robotic) and software models. This has required a detailed investigation of whisker mechanics, coupled with behavioural experiments, and electrophysiology.
