Philip Sabes
Chief executive of Arbor Neuroscience, the functional ultrasound research organisation formerly known as Forest Neurotech, and a Neuralink co-founder who worked there full-time from 2017 to 2020.
Background
Philip Sabes is a Neuralink co-founder. He retired from the UCSF faculty in 2017, becoming Professor Emeritus, to join Neuralink full-time, where he ran neuroscience research, and left in 2020. He earlier co-founded Integral Neurotechnologies.
Arbor Neuroscience
Sabes became chief executive when Forest Neurotech rebranded as Arbor Neuroscience in September 2026, with Whitney Griggs also joining its leadership. Forest was founded by Sumner Norman, Tyson Aflalo and Will Biederman as a nonprofit focused research organisation inside Convergent Research, working on functional ultrasound imaging as a way to read and modulate brain activity without implanted electrodes. Arbor has not disclosed its current funding, headcount or pipeline milestones.
Latest
On 14 September 2026 Sabes gave a keynote at the BCI Inno+ Salon symposium in Shanghai, hosted at Brain Intelligence World, a state-backed BCI industry cluster in Minhang District. He argued that the bottleneck in neuromodulation is prediction: clinicians cannot reliably predict what stimulation will do, so treatment outcomes are inconsistent. He called current practice “poke and hope” and positioned Arbor’s approach as “predict and treat”. He made no statement on US and China competition or export controls. The speech is documented in a single Chinese trade report.
Why it matters
Forest’s founders now span the ultrasound field: Norman and Aflalo co-founded Merge Labs, and Biederman founded Bridge Neurotech. Arbor’s opening clinical or preclinical results will be the test of the predict-and-treat thesis.