A Texas neurosurgeon and a Rice University engineer are joining the academic consortium that put the first BCI cursor under a paralysed person’s thoughts twenty years ago. Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine announced on 28 May 2026 that they have joined BrainGate, the multi-institutional research network founded by John Donoghue at Brown University in the early 2000s. The Rice-Baylor team is the sixth team in the consortium and the first based in Texas. The new site’s focus is decoding cortical neural signals to drive assistive robotic devices that help people with tetraplegia (paralysis of all four limbs) eat and drink independently. The expansion lands the same week Donoghue was named a 2026 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering co-laureate.

What the Texas team is bringing

Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) join an existing consortium that includes Massachusetts General Hospital, VA Providence Healthcare System, the University of California at Davis, Stanford University, and Emory University. The Rice-BCM site is the first in Texas and adds a southwestern node to a research network previously anchored on the East Coast (Brown, Mass General, Providence VA, Emory) and Bay Area (Stanford, UC Davis).

The clinical lead is Dr. Sameer Sheth, professor of neurosurgery and McNair Scholar at BCM, who also holds the Cullen Foundation Endowed Chair of Neurosurgery and directs the Gordon and Mary Cain Pediatric Neurology Research Laboratories at Texas Children’s Hospital. Sheth is responsible for recruiting participants, performing the surgery to place electrode arrays on the brain surface, and overseeing clinical care.

The computational lead is Nishal Shah, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rice and a McNair Scholar, who is a member of Rice’s Ken Kennedy Institute and the Rice Neuroengineering Initiative. Shah’s team is responsible for building the decoder that translates cortical neural activity into commands for the robotic system.

Nicole Provenza, assistant professor of neurosurgery at BCM and a McNair Scholar, is the Baylor principal investigator for BrainGate. Behnaam Aazhang, Rice’s J.S. Abercrombie Professor and director of the Rice Brain Institute, is co-director of the Rice Neuroengineering Initiative coordinating the Rice side of the partnership.

The BrainGate clinical trial pathway

The trial uses the BrainGate2 protocol, the consortium’s ongoing multi-centre investigation of intracortical BCIs in paralysed patients. Eligibility requires participants to be over 18, have paralysis in arms and legs or difficulty speaking, and have a medical diagnosis such as spinal cord injury, brainstem stroke, ALS, or another degenerative motor neuron disorder. The active trial is designated as an investigational device study under FDA oversight.

The Rice-BCM addition focuses on a specific functional goal that has previously been a secondary focus across BrainGate sites: independent activities of daily living, with eating and drinking as the lead use cases. Shah described the work as “perfecting a neurally controlled robotic arm for independence” and framed the early participants as “test pilots of a brand new airplane.” The clinical-engineering partnership pulls together Baylor’s neurosurgical-clinical expertise and Rice’s computational and robotics capabilities.

Strategic context

The expansion lands at a structurally significant moment for the consortium. Donoghue was named a 2026 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering co-laureate earlier this year alongside cochlear implant pioneers Graeme Clark, Erwin Hochmair, Ingeborg Hochmair, and Blake Wilson; deep brain stimulation pioneers Alim Louis Benabid and Pierre Pollak; and brain-spine interface pioneers Jocelyne Bloch and Grégoire Courtine. The Queen Elizabeth Prize positioned BrainGate’s intracortical BCI lineage alongside cochlear implants, DBS, and brain-spine bridges as one of the four foundational modern neural interface technologies. Adding two new sites in the same window strengthens the consortium’s structural position as the long-running academic anchor for clinical implantable BCI research.

For Rice, the BrainGate site is positioned as the flagship clinical commitment for the newly launched Rice Brain Institute, which Aazhang directs. For Baylor, it brings BCM’s existing functional neurosurgery programme into direct collaboration with the academic consortium that has produced most of the foundational implantable BCI clinical data over the past two decades.

What to watch

The first signal is the timeline to first implantation at Baylor College of Medicine. The announcement does not specify a target date for the first surgery, but the BrainGate2 protocol is already active and the Baylor site can begin enrolling once participants and the investigational device pathway are aligned. The second signal is whether Sheth’s broader research interests in neuropsychiatric applications (mood, memory, depression) shape the Rice-BCM team’s future clinical questions beyond the initial motor-restoration focus. Sheth and Provenza have publicly framed the motor BCI work as a pathway into neuropsychiatric applications, which would expand the BrainGate cohort beyond paralysis indications. The third signal is whether the Rice Brain Institute attracts additional clinical-stage BCI partnerships, given its newly launched cross-disciplinary mandate.

Sources

• Clinical trial seeks to advance intuitive assistive robotics for people with paralysis (Rice University News, 28 May 2026)
• Rice and Baylor join BrainGate to develop brain-computer interfaces for people with paralysis (News-Medical.Net, 28 May 2026)
• BrainGate clinical trials (BrainGate)
• 2026 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering: Modern Neural Interfaces