Beata Jarosiewicz

Beata Jarosiewicz received her Ph.D. in Neuroscience at the University of Pittsburgh and the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition in 2003. Her thesis characterized a novel neurophysiological state in the rat, Small Irregular Activity, revealed using then state-of-the-art multi-tetrode electrophysiology. As a postdoc with Dr. Andrew Schwartz at the University of Pittsburgh, she perturbed the decoding of a subset of neurons in a brain-computer interface (BCI) paradigm in NHPs to study how the brain solves the credit assignment problem, introducing a now popular paradigm for studying neural plasticity and dynamics. As a postdoc with Dr. Mriganka Sur at MIT, she used in vivo 2-photon calcium imaging and dual fluorescent retrograde tracing to study how higher-order visual areas obtain their distinct functionality from the tuning properties of spatially interleaved but differentially projecting V1 neurons. In 2010, she joined the BrainGate research team, where she helped enable the first demonstration of brain-controlled robotic limbs by people with paralysis, culminating in a Nature publication that received Clinical Research Forum’s “Herbert Pardes Clinical Research Excellence Award” as the most outstanding clinical research project of 2012. She also devised and implemented BCI self-calibration algorithms that maintained high-quality brain control over a point-and-click computer cursor across days and weeks without the need for user-in-the-loop calibration tasks. In 2018, she joined the Research team at NeuroPace, where she is helping to optimize the calibration of the RNS System, the only FDA-approved recording and brain-responsive neurostimulation device for people with epilepsy.