Principal Investigator:
Dr David Tsai

I am a Senior Lecturer at UNSW, jointly appointed between Biomedical Engineering and Electrical Engineering, where I lead the Biomedical Microsystems Lab. I have been supported by prestigious Fellowships from the NHMRC (CJ Martin) and the Kavli Foundation. My team's research has been continuously funded by the NHMRC since 2013, including an ongoing Ideas grant on soft brain machine interfaces. Our research has appeared in journals such as Nature Communications and Nature Nanotechnology. With students, my research has won the Student Paper Award twice and Best Papers Award once, at the IEEE EMBC conferences. I have been awarded in excess of $3.8M in research funding since appointment to my current post (2019). Beyond creating new technologies, we are also very keen on sharing our devices with the research community, and on the closely related area of research data sharing and data format standardisation. Our research on at-scale neurotechnology and CMOS microelectronics have also attracted industry collaborations internationally and within Australia (e.g. LeafLabs LLC, BlackRock Microsystems, and Contactile), backed by competitive funding schemes.

Following PhD, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University in the City of New York, till 2019, joint between the labs of Prof. Kenneth Shepard (electrical engineering) and Prof. Rafael Yuste (neuroscience). I was promoted to Associate Research Scientist in 2017. In March 2019 I returned to UNSW as Senior Lecturer.