By Anna Ligorio
Until he stepped into an operating room for the first time, Aaron Batista thought he knew a lot about the brain.
"Imagine spending your entire life snorkeling, and then suddenly you go scuba diving," says Batista, professor of bioengineering, University of Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering. "You'll quickly realize you were only scratching the surface of a deeper reality."
For Batista, a neural engineer with decades of research exploring brain-computer interfaces at the Swanson School, that realization stemmed from his earliest visits to the operating room of Jorge González-Martínez, who is the Dr. Stuart Niles Rowe Professor of Neurological Surgery at Pitt School of Medicine, which became the foundation for a novel postdoctoral training program: Neural Engineering in Neurosurgery: Bridging Engineering to Clinical Practice.