Claudia Cea (EE PhD '23) Named 2024 MIT Review 35 Under 35 Innovator List

EE alum Claudia Cea (EE PhD '23) built a flexible system based on ion transistors for human-computer interfaces. She was nominated for MIT Tech Review's  35 Under 35 Innovator List.

September 23, 2024

Claudia Cea, who completed her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering at Columbia in 2023 (advised by Prof. Dion Khodagholy), has made significant contributions to the field of bioelectronics and neural engineering, in which she was recently nominated for MIT Technology Review's  35 Under 35 Innovator List.

MIT Review's reporter Russ Juskalian wrote "Brain-computer interfaces have returned some aspects of vision to blind people and provided critical monitoring of conditions like epilepsy, but usually only for a short time before having to be uninstalled.

That’s because brain-computer interfaces tend to rely on silicon chips that degrade in the body or are rejected by the immune system. They are rigid, easily dislodged, and can cause injuries. And powering them requires bulky battery systems or hardwired connections that are impractical for devices that must be implanted inside the skull.

Claudia Cea, 33, circumvented these problems by replacing silicon chips with polymers. She developed the first flexible neural recording device based on an ion-gated organic electrochemical transistor. Such transistors depend on the movement of charged atoms known as ions, instead of pure electrical signals. They existed before Cea built hers, but were not fast enough to record brain signals in real time.

“The reason organic, ion-based transistors are slower than silicon is that they rely on ions to switch on and off—the ions have to migrate from the body into the back of the transistor,” says Cea. “I created ion reservoirs in the transistor itself, so that the distance the ions have to move is much smaller.”

Next Cea designed the data processing, transmission, and power modules to complete the system, all using ion-embedded polymers. One advantage of this approach is that ion-based signals propagate through human tissue. That means her implant communicates wirelessly from the inside of the skull to gold terminals placed along the inner and outer edges of the skull, which also send power back to the device."

Read more on MIT Tech Reiview's website here