In this engaging conversation with Dr. Nico Dosenbach, a clinician-scientist at Washington University, we dive into his personal journey from the Black Forest in Germany to his adventures in the US. Nico generously shared insights into his educational and career path, recounting his experiences studying biochemistry in New York City, making the decision to pursue an MD/PhD, and eventually specializing in pediatric neurology. The conversation delved into his early days as a researcher at...

In this conversation with Espen Dietrichs, we talk about the work of Carl Wilhelm Sem-Jacobsen, who almost certainly applied deep brain stimulation to the subthalamic nucleus chronically over weeks in 1958. Notably, this was ~40 years before the application of subthalamic DBS in Grenoble by the team of Alim Louis Benabid & Pierre Pollak (episode 4) following the pioneering animal work by Hagai Bergman (episode 17) and Abdelhamid Benazzouz who had demonstrated lesioning and DBS to the...

In this compelling episode we delve into the inspiring story of Jon Nelson, a remarkable individual who has braved the depths of mental illness and emerged as a beacon of resilience and hope. In a heartfelt conversation with Jon, he shares his lived experience with DBS device as a transformative treatment for mental illness. Against the backdrop of prevailing stigma surrounding mental health, Jon's journey unfolds as he not only navigates the challenges of his condition but also becomes an...

In this episode, we delve into the groundbreaking work of the Neuromodulation Lab at the NeuroSpin center, led by Dr. Béchir Jarraya. The lab’s mission is to evaluate brain modulation using pharmacological agents and electrical neurostimulation. Combining functional MRI with new neuromodulation techniques, they train awake macaques, with a unique mock-MRI process, to study consciousness-related domains. Their activities encompass MRI, electrophysiology, and 3-photon imaging to unlock the...

In this episode, we interviewed Dr. Mark Richardson, an expert in functional neurosurgery and the Director of the Brain Modulation Lab at MGH Neurosurgery. He shared insights into his career and the lab's focus on improving surgical treatments for epilepsy, movement disorders, and psychiatric diseases through a systems neuroscience approach. We discussed closed-loop deep brain stimulation in epilepsy, incision-less approaches like FUS and LITT, and the role of different nuclei in generalized...

We had the privilege of interviewing Dr. Charles Jennings, an accomplished scientist and leader in the field of neuroscience. As the Executive Director of the Program for Interdisciplinary Neuroscience and the Ann Romney Center for Neurologic Disease, Dr. Jennings oversees a vast network of researchers and clinicians who are dedicated to advancing our understanding of the brain and developing new treatments for neurological disorders. Dr. Jennings’ work is especially noteworthy for its...

Join us for an illuminating conversation with Drs. Joachim Krauss, Marwan Hariz, and Christian Moll, as we delve into the history of Stereotactic and Functional Neurosurgery, and the impact of serendipity in driving discovery. In the first part of the episode, we explore the fascinating history of Stereotactic Functional Neurosurgery, discussing the advances in technology and surgical techniques that have led to the current state of the field. We also touch on the challenges and ethical...

It was my great pleasure to talk with Philip Mosley, who is one of the most experienced neuropsychiatrists working with DBS and published seminal work on non-motor, neuropsychiatric side-effects of subthalamic DBS in Parkinson's Disease as well as DBS for obsessive compulsive disorder when targeting the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis. Our conversation spans many areas from public health, remarkable individual case examples, the role of caregivers in DBS surgery, whether DBS could alter...

It was my great pleasure to talk with Veerle Visser-Vandewalle, who is the Head of the Department of Stereotactic and Functional Neurosurgery at University Hospital of Cologne. As a unique setup, she chairs the stereotactic department with access to their own operating theaters in which they have carried out a wide variety of surgeries, including DBS for Parkinson's, Tremor, Dystonia, OCD, Alzheimer's Disease and Pain; as well as spinal chord stimulation and even brachytherapy as one of the...

It was my great honor to talk with Suzanne Haber about the importance of anatomy in neurosurgery and neuromodulation as a whole. Among many other topics, we discussed her seminal work on the subthalamic nucleus, the anterior limb of the internal capsule and briefly present work on the zona incerta, also in synopsis with earlier work from Mahlon DeLong (#22) and Anne Young (#23). Crucially, Suzanne is not only an anatomist but one with a particular interest in deep brain stimulation. She leads...

Mike Fox leads the Center for Brain Circuit Therapeutics at the Brigham & Women's Hospital at Harvard Medical School in Boston. The center is unique in that it houses colleagues from neurosurgery, neurology, psychiatry and neuroradiology under the same roof – with the aim to collaboratively work on novel neuromodulation treatments. It is a great honor to interview Mike about his earlier work with Marc Raichle on anticorrelated networks in the brain, his work on TMS network mapping, lesion...

It was my great pleasure to talk with Marie Krüger, who is currently leading the stereotactic surgery unit in St. Gallen but is on her move to join the team at UCL / Queensquare London. Marie trained in Freiburg, Germany, with Volker Coenen and Peter Reinacher, where she ran multiple studies about segmented electrodes and how to localize their directionality. After that, she carried out a fellowship with Chris Honey in Vancouver, where she developed a protocol of DBS for dental pain and was...

One of five adults in the United States suffers from a diagnosable mental illness at any one point in time. The burden of psychiatric diseases is massive on both personal and economic levels. It was a great honor to talk to Dr. Joshua Gordon, director of the National Institute of Mental Health. We covered finding a balance between i) running this entity with a budget of 1.6 billion USD and 3000 grants at any one time and ii) pursuing his own research using optogenetic methods to dynamically...

It was my great pleasure to talk with Nolan Williams, who is the mind behind the Stanford Accelerated Intelligent Neuromodulation Therapy (SAINT) protocol for treatment of depression. In this drastically intensified protocol, Fifty sessions of 1,800 pulses are delivered as 10 daily sessions over just 5 days – condensing what usually takes months to a single week. After making hands-on experience with deep brain stimulation, Nolan wanted to first work with this invasive technique in...

The tenth DBS Think Tank is about to happen in Gainesville, Florida next month – so it's timely to talk with the masterminds behind it: Michael Okun and Kelly Foote need no introduction in the field & represent a role-model power-couple of how neurosurgery and neurology can join forces to build something unique. In Gainesville, they built one of the most important DBS programs in the world, essentially from scratch, after setting their minds to this goal during residency. We talk the...

Following a fascinating talk Aryn gave at OptoDBS 2022, we talk about her work on optogenetically inspired deep brain stimulation for Parkinson's Disease. In a first paper (2017 Nature Neuroscience), Aryn's lab could establish that a specific lineage of cells in the external pallidum needed to be stimulated (or a second one suppressed) to achieve symptom relief in the 6-OHDA mouse model of Parkinson's Disease. Crucially, these effects outlasted the stimulation, sometimes by up to eight hours....

In this episode, I had the tremendous honor of speaking with Anne Young about the many highlights of her career, including key evidence that established Glutamate as a neurotransmitter, as well as her work on Huntington's Disease. Directly building upon the preceding episode with Mahlon DeLong, we now hear about the Ann Arbor Side of the so-called “Albin-Delong” model, which was equally informed by the team of Anne Young & her late husband John Penney alongside Roger Albin. In 1991, Dr....

In this episode, I had the great pleasure of speaking with Mahlon DeLong about the past and future of our field, the most influential model of the basal ganglia circuitry, microexciteable zones in the striatum, the role of the nucleus basalis in Alzheimer’s Disease and many other topics. We also touch upon the role of the basal ganglia model for psychiatry, more recent topics such as psychedelics or how instrumental the MPTP model for Parkinson’s Disease in nonhuman primates was. Mahlon...

In this episode, Aysegul Gunduz & Julian Neumann speak about Ayse's exciting work on closed-loop DBS in tremor, their tic-detector, and thriving as an engineer in a medical field such as DBS. They also touch upon minority groups in the field. The main focus of their 2020 Science Translational Medicine study, in which Ayse's team developed and studied a chronically embedded cortico-thalamic closed-loop deep brain stimulation system for treatment of essential tremor – clearly a landmark...

In this episode I had the honor to speak with Christian Lüscher about his exciting work on neuromodulation in addiction as well as the upcoming OptoDBS conference which he has been organizing since 2015 in Geneva. We cover Christian's milestone works in creating and refining a model of addiction in the brain, ways to counteract addiction using both optogenetics and DBS and why only about twenty percent of mice with unlimited access to drugs will become addicted. We discuss examples of...

In this episode I had the honor to speak with Sameer Sheth about recent advances in deep brain stimulation for psychiatric indications. We focus on two recent publications, a paper published in Biological Psychiatry that introduced a revolutionary novel concept of treating depression by inserting stereo-EEG electrodes to determine the individual circuitry involved in each patient's disease. The second was published in Nature Medicine and involved long-term local field potential recordings...

In this guest episode, Jeffrey Hausdorff and Nathan Morelli speak about transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), its mechanisms of action, current application in research, and where the field is going in the future. In this discussion, we cover many topics which will give you insight into this area of brain stimulation. We begin with the basics of tDCS from its historic origins and therapy fundamentals. Our discussion then progresses to a deep-dive inside some of Prof. Hausdorff's most...

In this episode, Hagai Bergman and I talk about his new book, The Hidden Life of the Basal Ganglia: At the Base of Brain and Mind. We cover some of the many highlights of his life in basal ganglia and deep brain stimulation research. This includes his crucial discovery that paved the way to subthalamic deep brain stimulation during his work at John Hopkins together with Mahlon DeLong and Thomas Wichmann. We talk about his three-layer model of the basal ganglia, one of the first...

In this episode, Julian Neumann and I talk about his research toward adaptive deep brain stimulation. Julian has recorded local field potentials from DBS electrodes implanted in patients with Parkinson's Disease, dystonia, essential tremor, obsessive compulsive disorder and depression and is a true expert on the mechanism of action of DBS. With his laboratory for interventional & cognitive neuromodulation, he has recently ventured into machine-learning based applications to decode brain...

In this episode, Peter Snyder and I talk about Jose Delgado, one of the inventors of deep brain stimulation. Peter's father, Dr. Daniel R. Snyder, served as Delgado’s last American-trained post-doctoral fellow at Yale in the early 1970s – and took over the laboratory at Yale when Delgado moved back to Madrid. We get a good feeling about Delgado as a scientist, his many inventions, his relationship with the media and his grand-plan toward a 'psychocivilized society' that would control behavior...