END ANIMAL TESTING!

KAIST professor Kyung-In Jang selected for ERC Synergy Grant to study how the brain controls movement in freely moving monkeys

An international research team including Professor Kyung-In Jang from KAIST’s Department of Mechanical Engineering has been selected for the European Research Council (ERC) Synergy Grant program, a major European research funding initiative

The Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)

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Credit: KAIST

How does the brain process sensory information and use it to control movement when we walk or touch an object? An international research team involving KAIST will investigate this question by monitoring brain activity in freely moving monkeys. The goal is to uncover the principles underlying the brain’s control of movement and, in the long term, lay the foundation for technologies that help patients with injuries to the nervous system return to everyday life.

KAIST (President Choongsik Bae) announced on November 6 that NeuroEthoPrim (“From Neuroethology to Restoring Sensorimotor Function via Stealth Neurotechnologies in Freely Moving Primates”), a project in which Professor Kyung-In Jang from the Department of Mechanical Engineering serves as a co-principal investigator, has been selected for a 2026 ERC Synergy Grant. This is the first time a researcher affiliated with a Korean university has been selected as a principal investigator under this program.

Professor Luca Bonini from the University of Parma in Italy serves as the project’s corresponding principal investigator. He co-leads the project with Professor Silvestro Micera of the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna (SSSA) in Italy and the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, and Professor Jang. Over the next six years, the team will receive approximately €9.68 million (approximately KRW 14.4 billion), of which approximately €3.10 million (approximately KRW 4.6 billion) will be allocated to KAIST.

The ERC is the European Union’s funding body for frontier research. The Synergy Grant program supports groups of two to four principal investigators who combine their expertise to tackle research challenges that would be difficult for a single researcher to address alone. The program also funded BlackHoleCam, which contributed to capturing the first image of a black hole in 2019.

The study focuses on how the brain functions as animals move freely. In conventional experiments, an animal’s head is held in a fixed position while it repeatedly performs a prescribed movement. This approach allows precise measurement of brain signals but offers limited insight into the complex movements of everyday life.

The team will simultaneously record brain activity, whole-body movement, and tactile information in NeuroEthoRoom, an experimental space where monkeys can walk freely and search for food. Through this approach, the researchers aim to determine how the brain translates what the animals see and feel into body movements.

The researchers will also study decoding, which uses brain signals to infer the intention to move, and encoding, which converts external sensory information into signals the brain can process. In this way, the team will examine communication in both directions: reading movement commands from the brain and conveying sensory information to it.

The collected data will be used to build a foundation model, an AI model that learns the relationships between different types of sensory input and movement. The goal is to use brain signals and behavioral data to identify the common principles underlying the control of body movement.

Professor Jang will lead the development of wireless neural interfaces. These devices record brain signals or deliver stimulation to the brain. His team aims to reduce the physical mismatch between soft brain tissue and rigid semiconductors so that the devices can maintain stable signal recordings as the animals move freely and stimulate specific brain regions as needed.

Professor Jang’s team plans to use the findings to support the development of ALEX, a next-generation brain chip, and LUCAS, an operating system designed to help patients with neurological disorders operate devices. The team will also pursue commercialization through ENSIDE, a faculty-founded startup. In the long term, the team aims to build on these technologies to develop a Brain-to-X platform that would enable patients with quadriplegia to control devices such as smartphones and wheelchairs using brain signals. Applying the technology to humans will require further research and validation of its safety and efficacy.

“The starting point for this research is to understand how the brain links sensation and movement when we move freely,” said Professor Jang. He added that the team would make every effort to ensure that the findings from this basic research help people with injuries to the nervous system return to everyday life.

Animal experiments in this project will comply with the EU Directive on the protection of animals used for scientific purposes (Directive 2010/63/EU) and will be conducted following approval from the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) at each participating institution.