Claire Nicolas

Head Clinical Neurotechnology Research Assistant

Massachusetts General Hospital

Claire joined the BrainGate team in 2022 as Head Clinical Neurotechnology Research Assistant (CNRA). As CNRA, Claire visits participants’ homes to facilitate their use of the BrainGate system. She collects data for various BrainGate projects focusing on improving neural signal decoding methods, various effector control, and ameliorating the use of the BrainGate system as an assistive technology. As Head CNRA, Claire also oversees the training of new CNRAs at the various BrainGate sites and acts as shipping clerk, social media manager, video editor and QA session tester for the BrainGate Consortium.

Claire received a B.S. in Biomedical Engineering with Distinctions from Worcester Polytechnic Institute. During her undergrad, Claire worked in Professor Erin Solovey’s Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Lab. She used functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) for various projects: modeling the language learning process for monolingual adults in the left hemisphere, modeling the rule learning process in the prefrontal cortex, and exploring brain metrics for improved human-robot collaborations (a joint study between UMass: Lowell’s NERVE center and the WPI HCI lab)

Partner Institutions

Brown Emory University Harvard Medical School MGH Stanford School of Medicine University of California, Davis DVA