BLURRING LINES BETWEEN ENGINEERING AND BIOLOGY FORMS A CLEARER PICTURE OF THE BRAIN
Takashi Kozai
Takashi Kozai, associate professor of bioengineering in the Swanson School of Engineering, wasn’t always a fan of biology. He wanted to be an engineer.
Then he learned about ATP synthase, a motor-like enzyme. “It’s like the smallest, most energy-efficient engineered system,” he says. “That’s when I became interested in bridging biology and engineering.”
Kozai’s research integrates the fields, bridging a gap separated by language, process and even thinking patterns to improve people’s lives.
“I think contributing to my success is my ability to switch back and forth between the mindsets and jargon of science and engineering,” he says. “To go from, ‘Here is my hypothesis, here is my prediction,’ to, ‘If it doesn’t perform at this minimum level, then it’s a failure.’”
He got his start out of necessity: as a graduate student, he couldn’t access the devices he needed, so he had to get creative. His lab developed brain implants, improving upon what was commercially available.
Then he became interested in how the brain works, particularly the role of so-called silent cells in neurodegenerative diseases. This work, coupled with his skills designing brain implants, led to a blending of the two fields.
“We need to think about the complex landscape that is the brain. Otherwise, we’re not even looking at half the puzzle.”
“We’re trying to stimulate activity,” Kozai says, “And ultimately allow people to do specific tasks that they’ve lost the capacity for because of disease or injury.”
Kozai is part of a team that received 2023 Pitt Momentum Award funding, part of an internal funding program operated by the Office of the Senior Vice Chancellor for Research and the Office of the Provost. The award allows Kozai and his team to create an ecosystem to restore a sense of touch to people with prosthetic limbs using sensors that relay information to the somatosensory cortex.
“The human subjects are able to get a sensation of touch in that robotic hand,” he says. But Kozai’s intentions go beyond restoring a sense of touch to people who have lost limbs, or even curing neurodegenerative diseases.
“I would like to get more people to see the world, not as engineering versus science, not as neurons versus non-neuronal cells, but in a blended way,” he says. “We need to think about the complex landscape that is the brain. Otherwise, we’re not even looking at half the puzzle.”