Edward Chang
Professor and Chair of Neurological Surgery, University of California, San Francisco
Edward Chang is chair of neurological surgery at the University of California, San Francisco. A specialist in advanced brain mapping of language, Chang and his laboratory have demonstrated the detailed functional blueprint of the human speech cortex, translating those discoveries into the development of a "speech neuroprosthesis"—a high-density electrode array implanted directly on the surface of the brain to record electrical activity. The team enabled a man with severe paralysis to communicate in sentences, translating signals from his brain directly into words that appear as text on a screen. This is the first successful demonstration of direct decoding of full words from the brain activity of someone who is paralyzed. Chang is the 2015 Blavatnik National Laureate in Life Sciences, recipient of the Winn Prize of the Society of Neurological Surgeons and an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine.