Mali Halac

Mali Halac is a PhD candidate in bioengineering at Harvard University, where he works in the Biohybrid Organs and Neuroprosthetics (BIONICs) Lab under Prof. Shriya Srinivasan. He designs minimally invasive tools and navigation systems for peripheral nerve surgery, closed-loop peripheral nerve stimulation for pain and gastric motility disorders, and battery-free injectable closed-loop peripheral nerve stimulators. A large portion of his research focuses on developing machine learning methods to decode high-density peripheral nerve recordings that inform clinical diagnostics and drive closed-loop neurostimulation.

Mali received his Bachelor's in electrical engineering under the guidance of Professors Hasan Ayaz and Banu Onaral at Drexel University's Cognitive Neuroengineering and Quantitative Experimental Research (CONQUER) Lab. He was nominated for the 2021 Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) Award for the development of a neuroergonomic BCI with a custom augmented reality display targeting continuous at-home use for people living with ALS. His earlier work on neural decoding includes reconstruction of natural images from fMRI recordings of the human visual cortex, presented at the 2022 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN).