When Nabeel Chowdhury was an undergraduate student at Washington University in St. Louis, he helped make prostheses for children and to design affordable sockets for the devices. His interest in prosthetics took off when he watched a three-year-old born without fingers put on a device he made and start counting on her hand. The Rolla, Mo. native recently successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis, “Pre-Perceptual Sensorimotor Utility of Evoked Afferent Signals by Peripheral Nerve Stimulation.”
Chowdhury’s thesis has been in the works since he came to Case Western Reserve University in 2017 to study with Human Fusions Institute Director Dustin Tyler. As he met study participants and read papers, he noticed cortical stim processing was almost 2 to 4 times slower than natural touch. “There was a running hypothesis in the field that there are other structures apart from the cortex that touch from the hand would go to before the cortex that would greatly improve how stimulated touch could be processed,” he said. “Our lab is uniquely positioned to stimulate the limbs that could interact with these other structures in the touch pathway.” When his second semester began, he ran an experiment proving his hypothesis that stimulation in Tyler’s lab was processed like a natural touch.
Chowdhury’s research delved into the touch process naturally and at the cortex, as well as the physiology of the touch pathway. He discovered that most engineering textbooks skip from the finger to the cortex rather than showing detailed diagrams of the network that touch stimuli cover. He then found studies theorizing that connections would be robust to peripheral nerve stimulation (PNS), a technique that involves electrical stimulation to activate the nerves. After conducting tests, he adapted similar proprioception and visual feedback studies for PNS.
When Chowdhury was looking for a university for Ph.D. studies, he was drawn to CWRU’s focus on the long-term benefits their technology had on users. “Most programs were excited to talk about how their implants worked for a month before taking them out of participants, but CWRU focused on how our electrodes and studies had been helping people for almost a decade and were being used at home,” he recalled. “CWRU focused on helping people and less on just making ‘cool stuff.’”
Throughout his time at CWRU, Chowdhury has prioritized mentoring new students in the lab and creating a sense of community. He is also proud of the relationships he has built with study participants. “It has always been important to me to foster a relationship with the participants that shows them they are my first priority,” he said.
