Matthew Willsey, MD, PhD

Assistant Professor of Neurosurgery and Biomedical Engineering

Director of Translational Brain-Computer Interface and Neuromodulation Research

Director of Clinical Trials in Neurological Surgery and Engineering

Neural Engineering Core Faculty, Biointerfaces Institute

Michigan Neuroscience Institute Affiliate

Matthew attended MIT where he received B.S. and M.Eng. degrees in Electrical Engineering with a research focus in digital signal processing. He later attended medical school at Baylor College of Medicine and completed his neurosurgery residency at the University of Michigan in 2022. He completed a PhD in Biomedical Engineering during his 2-year resident research time plus an additional leave-of-absence year. His research focused on intracortical brain-computer interfaces, computational neuroscience, and neuromodulation. After graduation, he completed a one-year, post-graduate appointment as a clinical instructor stereotactic/functional neurosurgery and epilepsy at Stanford University where he conducted research in the Neural Prosthetics Translational Lab directed by Dr. Jaimie Henderson.

He is currently an assistant professor of neurosurgery and biomedical engineering at the University of Michigan and is core faculty in the neural engineering cluster of the Biointerfaces Institute and a Michigan Neuroscience Institute affiliate. His research interests include brain-computer interfaces, neuromodulation (deep brain stimulation and spinal cord stimulation), and computational neuroscience. His clinical interests include deep brain stimulation, epilepsy, MR-guided focused ultrasound, pain. 

Matt Mender, PhD

Matt completed his PhD in Biomedical Engineering at the University of Michigan with Dr. Cindy Chestek. During his PhD he studied brain-machine interface algorithms, asking how well they generalize to task changes, and also worked towards restoring hand movements with functional electrical stimulation. Prior to his PhD he attended the University of Rochester and worked at Epic Systems.

Joseph Costello

Joey completed his BS in electrical engineering at the University of Michigan. He will start in the lab in February 2025 after completing his PhD in electrical engineering at the University of Michigan. His PhD research is focused on developing low-power brain-machine interfaces, algorithms for decoding finger movement from intracortical and EMG signals, and deep learning for real-time motor decoding.

Jordan Lam, MBBS

Jordan Lam completed his MBBS and BSc at University College London. His research interests include brain-machine interfaces, carbon-fiber electrodes, and other novel intracortical devices to record single-units from nervous tissue.