UCLA Samueli Professor Jonathan Kao Receives NIH Director’s Pioneer Award

Jonathan Kao, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, has received a Director’s Pioneer Award from the National Institutes of Health. The award offers a five-year, $5.5 million grant to help fund Kao’s research into noninvasive assistive devices for the paralyzed.

Established in 2004, the award is the most prestigious of the four NIH director’s awards under the High-Risk, High-Reward Research program. It “challenges investigators at all career levels to pursue new research directions and develop groundbreaking, high-impact approaches within broad areas of biomedical, behavioral or social science.”

Kao, who also holds a joint appointment in the Computer Science Department, has previously been recognized by the NIH, winning the Director’s New Innovator Award for his work on brain-computer interfaces in 2020. Accompanied by a five-year, $2.3 million grant, the award supported his research group’s development of a wearable, noninvasive brain-computer interface system that utilizes artificial intelligence to infer user intent. 

With this new grant, Kao aims to build on his previous AI-assisted system to further develop low-risk, high-performance devices that help people with paralysis perform both complex and everyday tasks, such as folding laundry, opening doors or picking up items. Using signals from noninvasive sources, Kao and his team will train AI copilots to decode user intentions faster and perform tasks with greater precision. The shared control between an AI copilot and the user could lead to clinically viable, assistive devices that help people with paralysis regain more control over their movements.

A member of the UCLA Samueli faculty since 2017, Kao directs the Neural Engineering and Computation Laboratory. He is also part of the Neuroscience Interdepartmental Program at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.

Kao is the fourth UCLA professor and the second from UCLA Samueli to earn the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, following Yi Tang, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering who received the honor in 2012.