Manuel Gomez Rodriguez

Manuel Gomez Rodriguez joined the Max-Planck Institute of Biological Cybernetics in September 2009 as a Ph.D. Student in the Department of Bernhard Schölkopf jointly with the Department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. Before doing so, he studied at Stanford University and at the University Carlos III in Madrid.

In 2006 he graduated from the University Carlos III as a Ingeniero in Telecommunications Engineering (German M.Sc. majoring in electrical engineering). In 2009, he earned a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. He has been a graduate engineer at Analog Devices in Ireland and a research intern at Max-Planck Institute of Biological Cybernetics. Please see his curriculum vitae for more biographical information.

Manuel Gomez Rodriguez is currently working towards a Ph.D. in the area of brain machine interfaces with a strong focus on combining robotics, brain computer interfaces and machine learning for stroke rehabilitation.

While traditional or robot-assisted physical therapy constitutes the key ingredient to rehabilitation after stroke, motor imagery has also been shown to have a beneficial effect in stroke rehabilitation. The next logical step is to combine these insights into an integrated stroke therapy, in which patients exert control over robot-assisted physical therapy through the decoding of movement intentions using a BCI. Such an integrated therapy can be expected to have a large impact on stroke rehabilitation, as the synchronization of robot-assisted physical therapy with movement intention is likely to result in increased cortical plasticity due to Hebbian-type learning rules.

In addition, Manuel Gomez Rodriguez also does some work in machine learning and optimization applied to problems arising in information networks and social networks. Please see his website at Stanford for more details about this.

Research Interests: Brain-Machine Interfaces, Brain-Computer Interfaces, Machine Learning
Biographical Information: Please see his curriculum vitae.
Publications: For the complete list of his publication, see here.
Collaborators: Moritz Grosse-Wentrup, Jeremy Hill, Jure Leskovec (Stanford), Bernhard Schölkopf, Jan Peters.

Key References

    •     Bib
      Gomez Rodriguez, M.; Peters, J.; Hill, J.; Schoelkopf, B.; Gharabaghi, A.; Grosse-Wentrup, M. (2010). Closing the Sensorimotor Loop: Haptic Feedback Facilitates Decoding of Arm Movement Imagery, Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (Workshop on Brain-Machine Interfaces).
    •     Bib
      Gomez Rodriguez, M.; Grosse Wentrup, M.; Peters, J.; Naros, G.; Hill, J.; Gharabaghi, A.; Schoelkopf, B. (2010). Epidural ECoG Online Decoding of Arm Movement Intention in Hemiparesis, 1st ICPR Workshop on Brain Decoding: Pattern Recognition Challenges in Neuroimaging.

Contact Information

Mail: Manuel Gomez Rodriguez, Spemannstr. 38, 72076 Tübingen, Germany
Phone: +49-7071-601-541
Fax: +49-7071-601-552
Email: manuelgr@tuebingen.mpg.de