Rate My Professor James FitzGerald

James FitzGerald is Professor of Neural Interfacing at the University of Oxford. He studied Physics at Oxford University, graduating in 1992, then switched to medicine, also at Oxford, graduating in 1998. After basic surgical training in Nottingham, he moved to Cambridge University where he obtained a PhD in neuroelectronic interfacing. He returned to Oxford in 2012 to take up clinical and research positions and now holds an academic faculty position in the Nuffield Department of Surgical Sciences along with a Consultant appointment in Neurosurgery at the John Radcliffe Hospital.

His research focuses on implanted and non-invasive electronic devices that interface directly with parts of the nervous system. A primary focus is the development of interfaces for recording signals from motor axons in severed peripheral nerves after amputation to control advanced prosthetic limbs, involving polymer microfabrication, microsurgical methods, and signal processing algorithms. Additional work addresses long-term scar suppression around implants through drug elution techniques. He is one of the academic consultants in Oxford Functional Neurosurgery, which maintains the UK’s largest clinical practice in deep brain stimulation, spinal cord stimulation, dorsal root ganglion stimulation, and peripheral nerve stimulation for movement disorders and neuropathic pain. He leads the Oxford Neural Interfacing Group and serves as President of the Neuromodulation Society of the UK and Ireland, on the board of directors of the International Neuromodulation Society, and as section editor for Brain Stimulation of the journal Neuromodulation: Technology at the Neural Interface. His qualifications include MA, BM BCh, FRCS(SN), and PhD.