Nishal P. Shah is the McNair Scholar Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University. His laboratory develops high–degree-of-freedom motor decoding methods to enable BrainGate2 participants to control robotic arms for independent performance of activities of daily living, including self-feeding. His group also investigates how higher-order cognitive signals can complement low-level motor decoding and explores writing information into recurrent cortical circuits using cellular-resolution electrical stimulation.

From 2020 to 2024, Nishal was the Milton Safenowitz Postdoctoral Fellow with Dr. Jaimie Henderson and Dr. Krishna Shenoy at Stanford University’s Neural Prosthetics Translational Laboratory and the BrainGate2 consortium. During this period, he studied how motor cortex representations of individual fingers are reused to generate combinatorial finger movements. He also developed efficient, flexible methods for real-time finger control and demonstrated their use for communication and recreational applications in individuals with paralysis.

Nishal received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, where he worked with Dr. E. J. Chichilnisky on the Artificial Retina Project. His doctoral research focused on computational models of retinal ganglion cell encoding, revealing how nonlinear spatial integration supports the representation of edges and textures, and quantifying inter-individual variability in neural encoding. He also developed a temporal dithering framework for reproducing retinal visual encoding at single-cell resolution.

He received his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi.