Narayan Sankaran, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at the University of San Francisco in the Neuroscience Department where his research spans both neuroscience and neuroethics. As a neuroscientist, his research seeks a mechanistic account of how the human auditory system enables perception of complex sounds – such as music and speech. To do this, he combines computational modeling, machine learning, and human neurophysiological measurements at different spatial scales using both intracranial and scalp-based recording techniques. As a neuroethicist, his research considers the ethical and societal implications of emerging neurotechnologies like brain-computer interfaces that decode information from users' brain activity.
Dr. Sankaran was one of the Kavli Center's inaugural Ethics, Science, and the Public Postdoctoral Fellows following a postdoctoral position in the Department of Neurological Surgery at the University of California, San Francisco with Edward Chang's lab. Dr. Sankaran continues a close collaboration with the Kavli Center in his role as a Kavli Center-hosted Rita Allen Civic Science Fellow, where he is conducting a community and stakeholder engagement research project to understand and connect impacted communities and non-scientific perspectives into the research agenda for the development of novel neurotechnologies, such as Brain-Computer Interfaces that function as neuroprostheses for communication and mobility. The project engages and researches perspectives around the ethical tension between the benefits these technologies may confer for people with disabilities on the one hand, and the threats to privacy that these technologies are perceived to create on the other.
