Rate My Professor Nicholas Opie

Professor Nicholas Opie is a Professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of Melbourne, where he serves as Laboratory Head of the Vascular Bionics Laboratory in the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences. He holds the degrees BE(Hons), BSc, PhD and MBA. His primary research interest is vascular bionics, with a focus on developing minimally invasive brain-machine interfaces such as the Stentrode, a stent-electrode array designed for recording and stimulating neural activity from within blood vessels to avoid the risks of open-brain surgery.

Professor Opie co-heads the Vascular Bionics Laboratory with Professor Thomas Oxley. The laboratory has demonstrated proof-of-concept for the Stentrode technology, including high-fidelity chronic recordings of cortical neural activity published in Nature Biotechnology in 2016 and focal stimulation results published in Nature Biomedical Engineering in 2018. Ongoing work includes clinical trials such as the SWITCH trial evaluating safety and efficacy in participants with paralysis, as well as applications for other neurological conditions. He is an NHMRC Research Fellow and has received awards including the National Foundation for Medical Research and Innovation Dr John Raftos AM Award for Advancing Innovation in 2022. Professor Opie is also involved in commercialisation efforts as co-founder of Synchron. His verified professional email address is available on official university sources.