@patrickdegenaar.bsky.social
I am a professor of neuroprosthetics at Newcastle University. I specialise in making implantable brain devices to restore sight to the blind
Emad testing his latest visual prosthesis chip
The scariest moment in a microelectronics PhD is when the Chip comes back from the fab. 2 years of design then the moment of truth! Some people are so scared, they wait months before testing.. But my PhD student Emad got stuck in and his visual prosthesis chip works! 😁 @nclengineering.bsky.social
16.12.2025 15:21 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
www.newcastle-hospitals.nhs.uk/news/newcast... Great to see this new Centre for Neurotechnology coming together here in Newcastle. It is an excellent initiative for the North East and builds on Newcastle University's rich history in the field @nclengineering.bsky.social #neuroprosthetics #bionics
15.12.2025 19:35 — 👍 2 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0@newcastleuni.bsky.social turned on its #christmas tree today. It always goes exponentially crazy just before Christmas, but with the lights on, the Christmas break is starting to get real 😀
@nclengineering.bsky.social
An image showing a concept visual prosthesis to restore sight to the blind.
Funded #PhD opportunity for UK home students to do exciting research into #VisualProsthetics to restore sight tot he blind. Students should be 1st class in Engineering/Physics.
www.findaphd.com/phds/project...
#VisionRestoration, #Neuroprosthetics, #NeuralEngineering, #Bioelectronics
Patrick gives talk on brain engineering
It was wonderful to give a talk today on Engineering the Brain at the Banerjee lab Christmas Symposium in Oxford University. @nclengineering.bsky.social
04.12.2025 21:38 — 👍 2 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
This image shows the concept of implantable optoelectronic devices for epilepsy and visual prosthesis. A sub-image shows the electric fields between key sub-components of the brain interface within the encapsulation layer. It is these electric fields that are responsible for degradation mechanisms.
Really proud that our (heavily delayed by COVID) groundbreaking method to improve the lifetime of optoelectronic implants by 100-fold has been published in IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering.
eprints.ncl.ac.uk/308760
ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/112...
@nclengineering.bsky.social
It is wonderful to see gene therapy in action. In this case, a boy's stem cells were modified to carry a missing gene, enabling them to produce an essential enzyme. It is further evidence for exciting frontier treatments such as optogenetic neural prostheses.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
It is great to see Our latest paper from PhD Student Cong Ma on "FEM Optimization of 3D Abiotic Glucose Fuel Cells for Implantable Medical Devices" hit the front cover of the Prosthesis Magazine 😀
www.mdpi.com/journal/pros...
@nclengineering.bsky.social
Our first snowman for the 2025-2026 academic year @nclengineering.bsky.social
20.11.2025 12:32 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Great to see Newcastle involved in this trial: www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
16.11.2025 18:40 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Jesmond Dene waterfall in Autumn
The Jesmond Dene in Newcastle is lovely at any time of year. But this year, the Autumn leaf fall has been particularly beautiful. Well worth a visit if you are a transient visitor or student in Newcastle city.
09.11.2025 14:55 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Super excited to finally get my DGX Spark AI workstationb(Yay 😁)..... only to realise all tge ports are usbc-c and my keyboards are not... Doh.. will have to wait another day or two to play with it..
04.11.2025 11:55 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
www.ncl.ac.uk/press/articl...
Wonderful to be part of this fun project! Body powered implants!! 😀
A PhD opportunity in Trustworthy AI systems for Pervasive Healthcare! Application deadline 14th November www.ncl.ac.uk/postgraduate...
21.10.2025 19:20 — 👍 3 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
An image of implantable fuels and what type of implant they can power - essentially, they are feasible for low-power systems up to and including cardiac pacemakers.
Well done to my PhD student Cong Ma who has published his first paper on "Optimising the Design of Implantable Fuel Cells" www.preprints.org/manuscript/2..., which is part of an EPSRC funded Glutronics project.
21.10.2025 17:16 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
It was great to host a fact-finding delegation from South East University, China this week. I was proud to be able to show the standard of our teaching and research here at Newcastle. SEU is a great place. Looking forward to the reciprocal visit.
17.10.2025 09:54 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
It's great to have a visiting fact-finding delegation from EEE at South-East University China. Proud to show how we do things here at Newcastle.
14.10.2025 13:59 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
youtube.com/watch?v=gS4r...
Great to see progress on robot hands - it's the final piece in the research puzzle before we all get robot butler.
Image of peaceful counter demonstrators preventing far right thugs from entering the main square.
Newcastle is a wonderfully friendly and welcoming city. So today I was especially delighted to see thousands of ordinary Geordies show up to prevent a few hundred far-right hooligans from giving the city a bad name.
27.09.2025 20:51 — 👍 4 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
I reviewed this fascinating piece of work today at TU Delft. Dutch PhD vivas are somewhat different in format to here in the UK. But in the end it is the quality of the candidate that matters. And happy to say he passed my thorough grilling. 😁
25.09.2025 19:10 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
It was wonderful to give my lecture on "Responsible Use of AI for Engineers" to our new MSc cohort today. A great bunch! and we had fun going through the tools together!
25.09.2025 18:20 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
hoppingsfunfairs.com
University life can be fun as well as work! From Friday, Newcastle will host its giant funfair called "The Hoppings", a yearly activity dating back to medieval times.
ugrf.nu.edu.eg
My Egyptian friends at Nile University have opened a junior research competition with the theme: “Young Minds, Global Vibes”
Great to have Jason from Synopsys here in @nclengineering.bsky.social to give a seminar on their RTL Synthesis tool
17.06.2025 10:01 — 👍 1 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
Equality has unfortunately become unfashionable in some quarters these days. But we absolutely need to inspire the next generation. It was wonderful to read about this collection of female engineers and their contributions to our collective wealth. www.electronicdesign.com/resources/in...
06.03.2025 20:11 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0We have very exciting job posts as part of a collaboration between Oxford, Bath, Sheffield and Newcastle to build a new type of implantable fuel cell for medical devices. Newcastle: jobs.ncl.ac.uk/job/Newcastl... Bath: www.bath.ac.uk/jobs/FM12468 Sheffield: www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DLJ247/r...
18.02.2025 20:27 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0If you fancy getting involved in developing an implantable fuel cells, we have some opportunities! the first is for excellent chemical engineers at the lab of Mirella Di Lorenzo - my Bath collaborator on our Vampires project. www.bath.ac.uk/jobs/Vacancy...
17.02.2025 15:56 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
It was wonderful to have a visit from Prof. Jong Mo Seo, Seoul National University to here in Newcastle. He gave a great talk on retinal prosthetics and we had lots of fun playing with our femtosecond super-laser!
13.02.2025 21:14 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Great to see the Chinese New Year festivities today in Newcastle. It is an interesting image together with the Irish Centre. Both communities actually have historical overlap from the 1840s and co-located in various UK, US cities.
02.02.2025 19:21 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-k4...
Every year, the Chinese have a New Year gala on TV to celebrate the new year. This year, they did a joint show with humans and robots! It is still a few years away, but I'm looking forward to having a robot butler that does the dishes!
