The Brain-Spine-Machine Interfaces Lab works at the interface of Neuroscience and Engineering. Our goal is to develop neural engineering-based therapies to treat neurological disorders and understand how neurological disorders impact the brain-spine network and its role in sensorimotor control. We collaborate with surgeons, clinicians, basic scientists, and engineers to bridge the gap between pre-clinical and clinical research and to develop therapeutic solutions.
Recent News
Dec 2025
Congratulations to Dr. Yadav on receiving the Junior Faculty Development Award through the Office of the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost at UNC-Chapel Hill.
Oct 2025
Congratulations to Jacob Slack and Madison Doss on receiving the BME Travel Award to present a talk and a poster at the 12th Annual International Conference on Neural Engineering in San Diego, CA.
Sep 2025
Congratulations to Gus Rutledge on receiving the Abrams Scholarship to continue undergraduate research in the Yadav Lab during the 2025-26 academic year.
Aug 2025
Congratulations to Jacob Slack on publishing the first clinical study from our lab in Brain Stimulation with lab alumni Ben Rees and Eleonora Borda, titled ‘Spinal cord stimulation restores locomotion in a Parkinson’s disease patient and rodents‘. This is a pivotal moment for the lab, where a novel idea was translated from animals to humans.
Aug 2025
The lab welcomes postdoctoral research associate Dr. Taylor Tvrdy. Taylor obtained a PhD in Neurophysiology in Dr. Roger Enoka’s lab at the University of Colorado Boulder in 2024.
July 2025
The lab welcomes PhD student Anna-Lena Stein. Anna-Lena obtained a Bachelors in Chemistry at Saint Thomas University in 2022 and Masters in Bioengineering at Temple University in 2025.
July 2025
The lab welcomes PhD student Manjima Sarkar. Manjima is part of the MD-PHD program at the UNC School of Medicine. She obtained a Bachelors in Biomedical Engineerin at University of Southern California in 2019, and a Masters at Oxford University, UK in 2020.
Apr 2025
Congratulations to Gus Rutledge on receiving the prestigious Sheerer Scholarship ($6,000) to continue undergraduate research in the Yadav Lab over the summer.
Jan 2025
Congratulations to Dr. Yadav on receiving the inaugural Joint BME-Neuroscience Collaboration grant ($37,000) with Dr. Krishna (Neurosurgery) to pursue a clinical trial in Parkinson’s disease patients using spinal cord stimulation.
Oct 2024
The Yadav Lab at the 2024 Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience
Oct 2024
Congratulations to Beesan Shehadeh and Gus Rutledge on their selection as Abrams Scholars to continue undergraduate research in the Yadav Lab.
Sep 2024
Congratulations to Jacob Slack and Madison Doss on receiving the BME Travel Award to present a poster and attend the Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting in Oct 2024.
Sep 2024
The lab welcomes Aditi Bhattacharya as a research assistant. Aditi completed her Masters in Biological Sciences and Bioengineering from the Indian Institute of Technology-Kanpur in Aug 2024 before joining us.
Sep 2024
The lab welcomes Sarah Kate Norris as a laboratory technician. Sarah Kate completed her Bachelors in Neuroscience in 2023 from UNC-Chapel Hill and worked as a technician in Psychology and Neuroscience before joining us.
Aug 2024
The Yadav lab welcomes Madison Doss – its newest PhD student. Madison completed her Bachelors in Biomedical Engineering and Neuroscience in 2023 from Loras College, Iowa, and worked as an engineer at John Deere for a year. Congratulations to Madison on earning the BME Merit Award given to outstanding incoming PhD students.
Apr 2024
Congratulations to Sidnee Zeiser on successfully defending her Master’s dissertation thesis at Purdue University Indianapolis Biomedical Engineering. Sidnee joined the lab in Aug 2021 as an undergraduate student and played an instrumental role in our animal behavior studies. The lab sends its best wishes to Sidnee on her future role as a Biomedical Engineer at Stryker.
Feb 2024
Congratulations to Jacob Slack and Sidnee Zeiser on their first, first-authored publication! The role of stimulus periodicity on spinal cord stimulation-induced artificial sensations in rodents in Journal of Neural Engineering.
2024
Important Update: The Yadav Lab moved to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), in North Carolina, in Jan 2024 in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. The lab will be affiliated with the Department of Neurosurgery and the Neuroscience Center at UNC, as well as the Closed Loop Engineering for Advanced Rehabilitation (CLEAR) – a joint center between UNC and NCSU. Nestled between the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains on the West and the idyllic Carolina coast on the East, the Research Triangle area – comprising of three top-tier institutions (University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, Duke University in Durham, and North Carolina State University in Raleigh) – is highly sought after by intellectuals, artists, and entrepreneurs who like working on interdisciplinary ideas. Students and postdocs excited about Translational Neuroengineering, interested in animal and/or human research, and fascinated by questions such as, what are the limits of human perception? or can we augment/restore human sensorimotor function? using neuroprosthetic devices and brain-machine interfaces should email Dr. Yadav about upcoming opportunities at UNC.
Sep 2023
Dr. Yadav received the prestigious NIH Director’s New Innovator Award totaling $2.33 million for the project Sensory Augmentation, Restoration, and Modulation using a Spinal Neuroprosthesis funded by the NIH Common Fund and NINDS.
Dr. Yadav was interviewed by the Stark Neurosciences Research Institute at Indiana University about his research vision and the lab’s research goals. Watch the interview to learn more about the lab.
Jun 2023
Dr. Yadav received the K12 Early Career Investigator Award of ~$300,000 funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) for clinical translation of his work on A Spinal Neuroprosthesis for Artificial Sensations .
Apr 2023
Dr. Yadav was awarded an external grant of $160,000 by the Indiana State Department of Health – Spinal Cord Injury and Brain Injury Research Fund to support research on developing a spinal neuroprosthesis to restore sensations using animal models of spinal cord injury.
Mar 2023
Jacob Slack presented a poster at the Ohio State University Chronic Brain Injury Day and earned the Best Graduate Student Poster Award under the Recovery theme. Congratulations Jacob!
Jan 2023
Dr. Yadav gave the Departmental Grand Rounds and Medical Resident Education lecture on the topic Brain-Machine Interfaces: Past, Present, and Future.
Dec 2022
Check out the latest preprint from the lab by first authors Jacob Slack and Sidnee Zeiser demonstrating that stimulus periodicity changes sensory detection and discrimination thresholds associated with spinal cord stimulation-induced artificial sensations, ‘The role of stimulus periodicity on spinal cord stimulation-induced artificial sensations in rodents‘
Oct 2022
The lab members got together for dinner to celebrate our Annual Fall get-together
Sept 2022
Check out new preprint from the lab by lab alumni Eleonora Borda and Ben Rees on closed-loop spinal cord stimulation and how it is beneficial for the treatment of Parkinsonian symptoms in rodents, ‘Closed-loop spinal cord stimulation is superior in restoring locomotion in rodent models of Parkinson’s Disease‘
Sept 2022
The lab welcomes undergraduate students Jonah Slack, Arshia Bhardwaj, and Scott Miller who joined our team in Fall 2022
July 2022
Lab members took the first lab group photo after a day of talks and posters at the Stark Neuroscience Summer Symposium. Yadav lab members presented four posters at the symposium.
May 2022
Dr. Yadav and colleagues (Dr. Gupta, Dr. Patel, and Dr. Zauber) were awarded the Collaboration in Translational Research Pilot Grant of $75,000 by the Indiana Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute for their research on deep brain stimulation to treat laryngeal dystonia.
Apr 2022
The lab welcomes medical students Halie Szilagyi and Anoop Chinthala as summer research interns through the IMPRS (Indiana University Medical Student Program for Research and Scholarship) program
Mar 2022
Incoming Fall 2022 PhD student (currently research engineering technician) Jacob Slack, B.S. receives prestigious University Fellowship to jumpstart his graduate education.
Feb 2022
Abstract ‘Understanding how stimulus periodicity impacts detection and discrimination of spinal cord stimulation-induced artificial sensations‘ accepted at International Neuromodulation Society INS 15th World Congress 2022.
Nov 2021
Summer student Ben Rees successfully presented a poster titled ‘Closed-loop spinal cord stimulation creates a pre-locomotion brain state in rats with Parkinson’s disease‘ at the Society for Neuroscience 2021 virtual conference. The poster was based on analysis of neural data performed during his summer internship in the lab in 2021.
Sept 2021
Congratulations to undergraduate researchers Sidnee Zeiser and Andrea Brunton on successful funding of their UROP research proposals as Purdue School of Engineering and Technology students in Biomedical Engineering. The funding will support their research during the 2021-2022 academic year.
Aug 2021
The Yadav lab is excited to welcome undergraduate research assistants to our team. They are each pursuing a degree in Biomedical Engineering at the Purdue School of Engineering and Technology, IUPUI.
June 2021
The Yadav lab welcomes Benjamin Rees – an undergraduate student starting his senior year in the Fall majoring in Neuroscience at University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. Ben is a Robertson Scholar and a premed student and he will be a research intern in the lab over the summer.
May 2021
New publication in Brain Stimulation from the lab titled ‘Generating artificial sensations with spinal cord stimulation in primates and rodents‘.
May 2021
The Yadav lab welcomes Jacob Slack who joined as a research engineering technician after finishing his undergraduate degree in Biomedical Engineering at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.
Yadav Lab : Brain-Spine-Machine Interfaces Lab 