Alik S Widge

Dr. Alik S Widge is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences at the University of Minnesota and a key member of the Institute for Engineering in Medicine. His work bridges neuroscience and biomedical engineering to advance brain stimulation therapies for severe mental illness.

• Board-certified psychiatrist
• Expert in deep brain stimulation (DBS), vagus nerve stimulation (VNS), and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)

Research Interests

Dr. Widge specializes in developing implantable neurostimulation technologies for treatment-resistant psychiatric conditions such as depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and addiction. His lab has pioneered closed-loop brain stimulation algorithms and connectivity-modifying methods, using rodent models for prototyping and human trials for biomarker discovery.

Projects & Grants

Current projects include:

• Ultrasonic Neuromodulation for Fibromyalgia (SPIRE Therapeutics, Inc.)
• FIRMM MRI Monitoring Software Commercialization (Turing Medical Technologies, Inc.)
• Striatal DBS Mechanisms (NIH)
• Subcallosal Cingulate DBS for Depression (Abbott Laboratories)
• Visual Biofeedback for MRI Motion Reduction (Turing Medical Technologies, Inc.)

Clinical & Collaborative Work

Dr. Widge co-leads initiatives to enhance neurostimulation technologies in central/peripheral nervous systems and standardize clinical biomarker research. He collaborates internationally on biomarker discovery and technology safety/efficacy trials.

Dataset Development

He contributed to PyBEHAVE, a Python-based framework for behavioral neuroscience experiments.