A high-bandwidth interface to the nervous system.

Paul Merolla took his electrical engineering degree here in 2000, then a doctorate in bioengineering at Penn and a postdoc in Stanford’s Brains in Silicon lab. At IBM he was one of the lead architects of TrueNorth — a chip with 5.4 billion transistors standing in for a million neurons, running in real time on less power than a light bulb. It made the cover of Science in 2014.

In 2016 he joined the founding team of Neuralink, which set out to build a device that reads and writes to the nervous system at high bandwidth. He stayed five and a half years, working latterly on the algorithms that decode brain activity, and left in 2022 to start an inference company.