Background

Sergey D. Stavisky, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the UC Davis Department of Neurological Surgery and co-director of the UC Davis Neuroprosthetics Lab. Stavisky is a neuroscientist and neuroengineer whose research is focused on developing intracortical brain-computer interfaces to restore communication and movement to people with severe paralysis from conditions like amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), stroke, and spinal cord injury. His work emphasizes practical BCI performance, robustness, and clinical translation.

Key Contributions

Stavisky’s research has achieved breakthrough performance in speech BCIs. His team developed a speech BCI system that translates brain signals into speech with 97.5% accuracy on a 125,000-word vocabulary, later reported at 99.2% on a prompted word-copy task in Nature Medicine in June 2026. In clinical demonstrations, Stavisky’s BCI enabled a patient with ALS to speak in real-time with family members, change intonation, and even sing simple melodies, capabilities that dramatically improve quality of life compared to traditional augmentative and alternative communication devices. His approach uses machine learning to decode the patient’s intended phonemes and words from neural activity. Stavisky was recognized for this breakthrough by being named, with David Brandman, to the 2026 TIME100 Health List. He was among the BrainGate consortium investigators awarded the 2024 Sean M. Healey International Prize for Innovation in ALS, and his laboratory won first place in the 2023 BCI Award for its speech BCI research.

Current Work

Stavisky continues to advance BCI technology at UC Davis, expanding his research beyond speech BCIs to include restoration of reach and grasp movements for people with paralysis. His laboratory is committed to practical clinical translation, working to make BCIs more robust, durable, and accessible to patients. In June 2026 the team reported in Nature Medicine that participant Casey Harrell had used the speech BCI at home for more than 3,800 hours over 22 months without researchers present. Stavisky’s vision is to develop BCIs that can restore multiple communication and motor capabilities, fundamentally improving independence and quality of life for people with severe paralysis.