Nikhilesh Natraj
San Francisco VA Health Care System, San Francisco VA Medical Center
Papers
2
Total Citations
31
H-Index
2
About
Nikhilesh Natraj is a rising neuroscientist whose research sits at the intersection of neural plasticity, motor control, and brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). His work fundamentally addresses a core tension in neuroscience: how the nervous system balances the need for stable neural representations with the capacity for adaptive plasticity. In his most-cited paper (2025, 29 citations), Natraj demonstrated that sampling representational plasticity of simple imagined movements across days enables long-term neuroprosthetic control, revealing that even well-rehearsed actions exhibit surprising flexibility in new contexts. Using electrocorticography (ECoG) recordings, he showed that the brain can maintain stable control over a BCI despite ongoing neural drift, a finding with profound implications for clinical neuroprosthetics. His earlier work (2023) further explored how flexible regulation of representations on a drifting manifold supports stable, complex control over time. By mapping how the brain reconfigures its internal models to adapt to new BCI demands, Natraj is helping to lay the groundwork for more robust, long-term neural interfaces. His contributions are particularly notable for bridging fundamental questions about neural representation with translational applications in motor restoration.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1
- 2