Location

John Radcliffe Hospital, West Wing, Level 6, Headley Way, Headington, Oxford, OX3 9DU

DPHIL START DATE

4 October 2021

PROJECT TITLE

Selective cortical surface stimulation for the sensory feedback in brain computer interfaces.

SUPERVISORS

Professor James FitzGerald and Professor Brian Andrews (visiting professor)

I completed my undergraduate degree in Physiotherapy in 2016 at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. In 2017, I practiced as a community service physiotherapist at the Tembisa Provincial Tertiary Hospital in South Africa before joining the Biomedical Engineering Research Group at Stellenbosch University under the supervision of Professor David van den Heever in 2018. My Masters project investigated early preparatory motor processes using deep learning and electroencephalography. I graduated cum laude in 2019, and then worked as a Data Science Intern at Aerobotics before joining the Swammerdam Institute for Life Sciences at the University of Amsterdam for a research internship in computational neuroscience in 2020. Here, under the supervision of Professors Jorge Mejias and Conrado Bosman, I implemented a data processing pipeline for granger causal analysis of electrocorticography datasets as recorded during attention and decision-making tasks performed by macaques. In 2021, before joining the Nuffield Department of Surgical Sciences, I worked as a software engineer at an early-stage computer vision startup which involved the development of algorithms to deliver business insights to African business owners from their existing CCTV footage. 

As of October 2021, I am a part of the Oxford Neural Interfacing group at the Nuffield Department of Surgical Sciences where I will be working towards a DPhil under the supervision of Professor James Fitzgerald and visiting Professor Brian Andrews. I will be using both computational and experimental neuroscientific methods to investigate the selective stimulation of the deep (sensory) cortex with the goal of achieving naturalistic, upper limb sensation with brain-computer interfaces.