Recipient of honorary degree lauds liberal arts grounding he got there
Thirty-three years after last seeing the Union College campus as an honored psychology graduate, Ted Berger credits the broad based liberal arts education as crucial to the scientific, academic and business teamwork that is key to his ground-breaking research into building a “bionic brain.”
Theodore W. Berger, of Union College’s Class of 1972, walks with Union President Roger Hull in front of the Nott Memorial on campus Thursday. Berger was awarded an honorary doctorate during Union’s Founders Day convocat
As head of the Center for Neural Engineering at the University of Southern California since 1997, Berger leads more than 40 scientists and engineers seeking to replace damaged brain parts with computer chip technology.
During a breakfast Thursday with Capital Region business executives at Union, Berger said the academic world operates in a new environment that requires much closer ties to business and its entrepreneurial spirit.
Explaining his research in mimicking brain responses to help Alzheimer's or brain-damage victims regain memory functions, Berger said “We really want to reach the real world.”
Scientific research is a family tradition with Berger. His wife, Roberta Diaz Brinton, a USC professor of molecular pharmacology and toxicology, spoke of the importance of learning business expertise as she researches ways to mimic the hormone estrogen's potential in preventing Alzheimer's disease.
Berger, 54, was raised in Arlington, near Poughkeepsie, where his father was an electrical engineer with IBM. In the midst of a mini industry of his own, Berger is part owner of Safety Dynamics, a Chicago company making devices that sort specific sounds from background noise, as a human can.
Already, he said, Chicago police have used them in high-crime areas to pinpoint gunshots from as far as a block away.
The systems have also been installed by police in Los Angeles and San Francisco, and 400 units have been sold to a security company in Mexico. Homeland Security officials are considering similar sensors in a wireless grid planned for New York City, Berger said.
The military is also interested in a system to sense the sound of a gun being cocked, and NASA wants voice-controlled equipment to use in the din of the “tin can” atmosphere of the International Space Station.
But it is Berger's brain-chip research that has been recognized around the globe.
Aided by about $40 million over 10 years from the National Science Foundation, as well as advice from various industries, the USC team has already connected the neurochip technology to slices of living rat brain, with implantation into a monkey brain planned in seven to eight years. Clinical trials in human brains are expected within 12 to 15 years, Berger said.
Already armed with a 1976 doctorate from Harvard, Berger received an honorary doctorate in science Thursday during Union ceremonies marking the 210th anniversary of the college's founding in 1795.
Berger praised U n i o n ' s 5-year-old “Converging Technologies ” program to help students adapt to the increasingly closer relationship with business.
“What good is a microchip [mimicking brain functions] if it's not approved by the FDA and sold ” to help patients, Berger said.
Union President Roger Hull called Berger “the personification of what we're attempting to do.”