Dr. Maitreyee Wairagkar is a postdoctoral scholar with Dr. Sergey Stavisky and Dr. David Brandman in the Neuroprosthetics Lab at the University of California, Davis. She is working on developing BCIs to continuously synthesize speech from intracortical neural activity to restore lost speech. Her research focuses on decoding speech and movement-related neural activity recorded at different scales and studying their underlying temporal dynamics to build neurotechnologies including BCIs, rehabilitation, and assistive devices for severe brain injury and neurological diseases.

Previously, Maitreyee was a postdoctoral researcher at Imperial College London and UK Dementia Research Institute where she worked on developing effective social robots and assistive neurotechnology to support people with dementia at home. She is the recipient of the UK Dementia Research Institute Pilot Award and MedTech SuperConnector accelerator grant to develop and translate neurotechnologies for dementia. Maitreyee received a Ph.D. degree in Cybernetics and an MEng degree in AI and Cybernetics from the University of Reading, UK. During her Ph.D. research, she studied temporal dynamics of broadband EEG during voluntary movement with applications in non-invasive motor control BCIs. At the University of Reading and the University of Southampton, she also developed neurorehabilitation tools for motor and language therapy for brain injury, which was transferred for commercialization, and worked on modeling and classifying movement kinematics of people with Parkinson’s disease.