Nicholas G. Hatsopoulos

About

Nicholas G. “Nicho” Hatsopoulos, Ph.D., is a Professor at the University of Chicago and has served as the Chairman of the Computational Neuroscience graduate program from 2008 to 2015. He leads a laboratory that includes graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and technicians, with funding partly provided by the National Institutes of Health. His research focuses on the neural basis of motor control and learning, investigating how features of motor behavior are encoded and represented in the collective activity of neuronal ensembles in the motor cortex. Dr. Hatsopoulos studies how these neural representations change during motor learning by recording electrical discharges from many motor cortical neurons using multi-electrode arrays and correlating these signals with motor behavior. His work explores the encoding properties of individual neurons, their relation to higher-order group representations, and the potential changes in functional connectivity among neurons during motor learning. He completed his B.A. in Physics from Williams College in 1984, his M.S. in Psychology in 1991, and his Ph.D. in Cognitive Science from Brown University in 1992. He also co-founded Cyberkinetics Neurotechnology Systems in 2001, a company that developed neural prosthesis technology to assist individuals with severe motor disabilities. Prior to his current position, Dr. Hatsopoulos was an Assistant Professor of Research in the Department of Neuroscience at Brown University from 1998 to 2001,…

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Physics
• Biology
• Artificial Intelligence
• Telecommunications
• Simulation
• Medicine

Selected publications

• Neural population dynamics in motor cortex are different for reach and grasp

  eLife · 2020 · 77 citations

  Low-dimensional linear dynamics are observed in neuronal population activity in primary motor cortex (M1) when monkeys make reaching movements. This population-level behavior is consistent with a role for M1 as an autonomous pattern generator that drives muscles to give rise to movement. In the present study, we examine whether similar dynamics are also observed during grasping movements, which involve fundamentally different patterns of kinematics and muscle activations. Using a variety of anal…

  PublisherDOI

• Postural Representations of the Hand in the Primate Sensorimotor Cortex

  Neuron · 2019-10-24 · 70 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Propagating Motor Cortical Dynamics Facilitate Movement Initiation

  Neuron · 2020 · 45 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Biomimetic multi-channel microstimulation of somatosensory cortex conveys high resolution force feedback for bionic hands

  bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) · 2023 · 35 citations

  Manual interactions with objects are supported by tactile signals from the hand. This tactile feedback can be restored in brain-controlled bionic hands via intracortical microstimulation (ICMS) of somatosensory cortex (S1). In ICMS-based tactile feedback, contact force can be signaled by modulating the stimulation intensity based on the output of force sensors on the bionic hand, which in turn modulates the perceived magnitude of the sensation. In the present study, we gauged the dynamic range a…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Interplay between external inputs and recurrent dynamics during movement preparation and execution in a network model of motor cortex

  eLife · 2023-03-14 · 24 citations

  articleOpen access

  The primary motor cortex has been shown to coordinate movement preparation and execution through computations in approximately orthogonal subspaces. The underlying network mechanisms, and the roles played by external and recurrent connectivity, are central open questions that need to be answered to understand the neural substrates of motor control. We develop a recurrent neural network model that recapitulates the temporal evolution of neuronal activity recorded from the primary motor cortex of…

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• NIH Grant K01MH001671

  NIH · $323k · 2001

• NIH Grant R01NS045853

  NIH · $4.5M · 2018

• Coding of Action by Motor & Premotor Cortical Ensembles

  NIH · $2.2M · 2019–2025

Frequent coauthors

• Adam S. Dickey

  Emory University

  51 shared

• Pascal Wallisch

  New York University

  48 shared

• Marc Benayoun

  Wake Forest University

  48 shared

• Tanya I. Baker

  48 shared

• Michael Lusignan

  48 shared

• John P. Donoghue

  Rehabilitation Research and Development Service

  30 shared

• Kazutaka Takahashi

  University of Missouri

  29 shared

• Aaron J. Suminski

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  22 shared

Labs

• Hatsopoulos LabPI

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