Dr. Shy Shoham was born in September 1973 in Rehovot, Israel.  He received a B.Sc. degree in Physics from Tel Aviv University (1992). Between 1995 and 1996 he was a graduate student in the interdisciplinary Neural Computation program  in the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, before moving to the University of Utah, where he completed a Ph.D. in Bioengineering (2001). Between 2001 and early 2005 he was a Lewis-Thomas postdoctoral fellow at the department of Molecular Biology, Princeton University. In March 2005 he joined the Technion?s faculty of Biomedical Engineering, where he directs the Neural Interface Engineering laboratory.

Dr. Shoham?s research interests revolve around the engineering and application of bi-directional neural interfaces that allow recording and/or controlling activity patterns in large populations of nerve cells in parallel.  As a graduate student Shy worked with Prof. Richard A. Normann and in collaboration with Brown University?s Prof. John P. Donoghue on the development of an implantable brain-machine interface for paralyzed individuals using the Utah Electrode Array and related technology (currently in clinical trials by Cyberkinetics Inc.) As a postdoctoral fellow, Shy, together with Prof. Samuel S.-H. Wang developed and applied the first system for spatiotemporally patterned neurotransmitter uncaging, which allows a versatile mechanism for stimulating upwards of 20,000 neural structures per second. The system was fully integrated with a custom-made multiphoton microscope for concurrent imaging. Shy has also collaborated with several other research groups on projects involving the analysis of neural signals.  His laboratory is developing multiphoton microscopic methods for improving our ability to study information processing by neocortical neurons, as well as light-based neuroprosthetic device technology.

Dr. Shoham has been awarded the Whitaker and Clyde-Christensen scholarships (as a graduate student), a Lewis-Thomas fellowship (as a postdoctoral fellow), and a Marie-Curie International Reintegration fellowhip (as a faculty member).

Shoham S, O?Connor DH and Segev R, How silent is the brain: is there a ?dark matter? problem in Neuroscience? Journal of Comparative Physiology A (2006) in press

Shoham S*, O?Connor DH*, Sarkisov DV and Wang SSH, Rapid neurotransmitter uncaging in spatially defined patterns, Nature Methods 2(11), 837-843 (2005)  (see also News & Views by Haydon and Ellis-Davies pp. 811-812)

Shoham S, Paninski L, Fellows MR, Hatsopoulos NG, Donoghue JP and Normann RA, Statistical encoding model for a primary motor cortical Brain-Machine Interface, IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering 52(7), 1312-1322 (2005)

Lin L*, Osan R*, Shoham S, Zuo W, Jin W and Tsien JZ, Identification of network-level coding units for real-time representation of episodic experiences in the hippocampus, Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences 102, 6125-6130 (2005)

Paninski L, Shoham S, Fellows MR, Hatsopoulos NG and Donoghue JP, Superlinear population encoding of dynamic hand trajectory signals in Primary Motor Cortex, Journal of Neuroscience 24(39), 8551-8561 (2004)

Shoham S, Fellows MR and Normann RA, Robust, automatic spike sorting using mixtures of multivariate t-distributions, Journal of Neuroscience Methods, 127(2), 111-122 (2003)

Shoham S, Halgren E, Maynard EM, and Normann RA, Motor-cortical activity in tetraplegics, Nature, 413, 793 (2001)