معرفی
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.
