Page 2 - ARCS Pittsburgh Spring 2021 Newsletter

CURRENT SCHOLAR
Nathan Brantly
Nate Brantly (second-year scholar) holds The Jeanne Berdik Founder Chapter Award at the University of Pittsburgh’s Swanson School of Engineering. Here is his update (extracted with his permission from a letter to Jeanne Berdik).
Thank you very much for your support. It has been a challenging year with a lot of uncertainty and isolation, but I feel grateful for the opportunity to conduct research that I enjoy.
I am a student in the Rehab and Neural Engineering Labs at Pitt, where I study intracortical brain-computer interfaces with the goal
of restoring arm and hand function to individuals with tetraplegia. Our lab was shut down for a few months last spring, but since mid-June, we have been operating again with precautions and protective equipment. We have one participant who has been part of this research study for over five years and another who joined us in August 2020.
Both participants underwent surgery to have two electrode arrays placed in a movement area of the brain and two more placed in a touch area of the brain. We “read” from the movement area to decipher what the participant wants the arm (either a virtual arm on a screen or a robot arm) to do, and we stimulate the touch area of the brain to restore sensation when the hand contacts an object.
I am currently working on a “Fragile Egg” experiment where the participant must grasp an object with enough strength to hold it but not so much strength as to “break” it. We want to see how task performance may vary depending on the hand control algorithms we use or the sensory feedback provided to the participant.
ARCS members, please encourage current scholars whom you know to share their stories with you or directly with Millie Myers msmyers@cmu.edu for inclusion in future newsletter.
ARCS Pittsburgh’s
DEI Statement Linda Burke
As President of the Pittsburgh Chapter,
I also serve on the National Council of Presidents. Among the topics we have discussed in recent Council of Presidents’ meetings is the need for ARCS to have a Diversity, Equity and inclusion (DEI) statement. I contacted CMU and Pitt to ask for their views of the desirability of such a statement. They were very positive and encouraging about our having such a statement and sent me examples of statements in their own organizations. From those examples and discussion, I drafted a base statement for discussion by the Pittsburgh Board. We explored the need for a DEI statement through two Pittsburgh Chapter Board meetings and, based on those discussions, modified our statement. At our January 14, 2021 meeting, the Pittsburgh Board unanimously adopted the following statement:
“ARCS FOUNDATION PITTSBURGH CHAPTER, an organization of women committed to advancing science in the U. S. through awards to PhD students, supports the universities we serve in their efforts to integrate inclusion, diversity and equity as a priority,
and are committed to reflect those principles in our own organization.”
This is an important first step, but such a statement is meaningless without an action plan. We briefly discussed possible actions, including emphases on recruitment, on influencing scholar selection, and on influencing the composition of the Universities’ selection committees. We hope to develop more concrete actions and details in future meetings and welcome your ideas on such a plan. Because ARCS National was planning to discuss the DEI statement at the National Meeting on January 22, we decided to await that discussion before sending tour statement to the Universities.
The National discussion focused largely and favorably on Pittsburgh’s statement, and a committee will be formed to finalize a national statement. Therefore, we are in a holding pattern on disseminating our statement, to see if the National Statement should be used instead,
but this is ours as it stands at the time the newsletter goes to press.