Juan Álvaro Gallego

Even though he still contemplates the universe with awe – and confesses that one of his favourite podcasts is Sean Carroll’s Mindscape – his curiosity for systems engineering, robotics, and electronics unexpectedly steered him towards neuroscience. 

Juan Alvaro Gallego, an Associate Professor at Imperial College London, has very recently joined the Champalimaud Foundation’s new Centre for Restorative Neuroscience, is set to continue exploring how the brain controls movement, blending fundamental research with cutting-edge technologies.

In this interview, he shares his vision for a lab where creativity drives scientific progress, and where the conversation between science, art, and human experience is key.
 

Can you tell us a bit about where you’re from, and how you first got interested in Science?

I am originally from León, a small town located in the northwest of Spain, in the Province of León, and not Galicia, despite my surname “Gallego” – which means "someone from Galicia".
What brought me to science? I recall being very intrigued by a book I read while in high school, Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time”. I found it absolutely fascinating so I started alternating between my usual fiction and poetry books and popular science books on cosmology and theoretical physics – remember this is pre-internet times –, and I began contemplating the idea of becoming a physicist myself. However, coming from a rather small town which encourages you to be pragmatic, I asked myself the practical questions of life such as “Will I ever find a job in academia as a theoretical physicist?”. I wasn't convinced.
So, I entertained the idea of becoming an architect – since I wanted my profession to blend technical and creative dimensions – but this area was dwindling due to the housing bubble in Spain at the time, so I “settled” and went towards engineering. This all now seems ironic today given how my career turned out!
 

From engineering to biomedicine - how did that happen?

It was a bit serendipitous at first, but I got hooked right away. As I trained to become an engineer, I got more and more attracted to control systems, electronics, and robots that interact with the physical world. During my final year, I applied for an Erasmus to enjoy an experience abroad – because engineering and science are hard so we need to keep it fun – and I went to the University of Montpellier 2, in France, where I joined a group with a strong expertise in bioengineering at The Laboratoire d’Informatique, de Robotique et de Microélectronique de Montpellier (Laboratory of Computer Science, Robotics and Microelectronics of Montpellier). There, I chose to study human tremor…and this is how it all started: reading the literature, talking to neurologists and engineers in the field, grasping the important links between what I had studied at university and the technological applications in neurology and neurotechnology. During those months, my goal became to understand human movement and how to restore it  in conditions such as Parkinson’s or essential tremor. This all led to my doing PhD with a group at the Spanish National Research Council (CISC) in Madrid, which engineered solutions to attenuate human tremor. There, I focused on developing a closed-loop system that counteracted tremor using electric stimulation of muscles, which we delivered via sticky electrodes and was adjusted online based on the patient's symptoms.
 

And what led you more deeply into neuroscience?

During my PhD years, I was very enthusiastic about developing engineering solutions to counteract tremor, but I also got interested in learning more about the neural processes that cause the tremor in the first place. So, while still engaged in my engineering work, I nurtured my curiosity for tremor, movement disorders, motor control, and the brain in general. Towards the end of my PhD, I spent several months at Dario Farina’s laboratory in Denmark, where I gained experience with techniques for recording motoneurons* in the human spinal cord. My work in this lab turned out to become my first research project in neuroscience, where I focused on describing the properties of motoneurons from people with tremor, and understanding how these change between conditions  – from holding a posture to resting your arm– to better define what causes the tremor. 

After this experience, I was awarded a post-doctoral Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions fellowship to join Lee Miller's laboratory at Northwestern University, in the United States (US), where I worked on brain-computer interfaces in nonhuman primates. Essentially, we used recordings from the main area of the cortex involved in controlling our limbs, the motor cortex, to “decode” – that is, infer – the details of the monkey’s attempted movement, which we then caused using electrical stimulation of muscles, the same technique I had used in tremor patients during my PhD. This approach has now been used by other groups in the US to restore hand use in paralysed patients.

There is still a long story to tell about what has happened since then, but you could say that my focus has been using neuroscience to understand how the brain controls movement, and using engineering to help restore it.

* Motoneurons are the cells in our spinal cord that make muscles contract by generating small electric impulses; this is also why our muscles contract when we stick our fingers into an electric socket (don't try this at home or anywhere!). 

Why the Champalimaud Foundation?

I have known the Champalimaud Foundation (CF) for quite some time through different people and of course through its research outputs in several of the areas I am interested in. I also remember attending the 2018 Champalimaud Research Symposium as a postdoc and feeling impressed by the neuroscience community, the event itself, and the place. 
When I heard about the Centre for Restorative Neurotechnology – this new initiative at the intersection between systems neuroscience and more applied, translational neuroscience–, I felt it was the perfect opportunity for a new chapter in my story. I am really looking forward to collaborating with the different laboratories and platforms at CF as part of this new journey.
 

What kind of lab culture will you build?

First, I need to acknowledge the excellent mentors I have been lucky enough to have over the years, Eduardo Rocon during my PhD, and Lee Miller and Sara Solla during my postdoc. Drawing much inspiration from their mentoring style, and building on what we were able to build at my lab at Imperial College London, I truly believe that success in science hinges on individuals who are passionate, curious and determined to pursue long-term goals despite the challenges they face. At CF, I will continue to be open to new project ideas, aligning people's interests with my own research questions or exploring new directions together. I encourage autonomy, creativity, critical thinking and rigour, while serving lab members as a guide in their scientific journey.
 

What will your research focus on?

I want to cover the full spectrum of Research & Development and replicate a sort of in-lab positive feedback loop, from fundamental research through to applications. 

Our main activities will be conducting research and studying motor control and motor learning, doing experiments and modelling the nervous systems to understand how animals and humans control their movements. To understand how animals and humans learn and control their movements, we will continue performing large scale brain recordings and manipulation studies in mice, as well as studying the behaviour of spinal motoneurons during complex tasks in humans. On the clinical applications side of things, we will be co-developing technologies which could offer care and relief for patients with movement disorders. For that, we will continue working on the potential of spinal motoneuron activity as a signal that paralysed people can use to interact with computers, robots and their own bodies, or for rehabilitation after a stroke.
Our other activities will be exploring the more philosophical implications of the way we describe how the brain works.
 

What do you mean by “philosophical implications”?

I mean the philosophy behind the scientific paradigm we choose in our own research. In brain research, the traditional view was that each neuron that makes up a brain was the fundamental “computational” unit. More recently, our group and others have adopted the idea that brain function is better explained by looking at the collective patterns described by many neurons, rather than looking at each neuron individually. This is a bit in the sense of “the whole is more than the sum of its parts” which also applies to other areas of science such as physics or chemistry.
My interest here is to continue questioning whether this view truly is how the brain works, or if it is just a useful way for us scientists to describe what goes on. I like to use an analogy for this: Do we make better sense of music by listening to the entire orchestra, or to the individual players? I think we’d all agree that the former is the more intuitive answer, and I also think that an increasing number of neuroscientists would answer the same which would mean that we understand the brain better by listening to its orchestra. Yet, what I am truly interested in is more controversial: What does the brain listen to when we decide what to eat or how to move ? Does it listen to the song played by the orchestra, or to the sound of the individual players?
 

What excites you most about CF’s ecosystem?

The people, of course! 

But from a scientific point of view, I look forward to enhancing our mouse experiments and our modelling work by building collaborations with various teams at CF. For the human experiments at the Centre for Restorative Neurotechnology, I am looking forward to leveraging non-invasive technologies such as augmented and virtual reality, using the immersive rooms and all the robotics expertise at CF. We will also be working with clinicians and patients with neurological conditions as they play a key role in advancing our understanding of motor control and how it can be restored after injury or disease.
For example, one of the projects I have been discussing with my new colleagues is to use our technology to track the activity of spinal motoneurons in people with paralysis, and use it as control signals for immersive videogames that people can play at home. Our expectation is that – in combination with other interventions – this approach will help participants regain some of their lost ability to control their limbs.

One more thing. As I mentioned earlier, I believe connections across fields are a great source of inspiration. I am very motivated to join the outreach and interdisciplinary activities to engage with artists, dancers, writers, and the general public; sometimes the most challenging questions come from children.

 

Interview by Thaïs Lindemann, Neurotechnology Liaison Officer in Communication, Events and Outreach team, and in the CRN Coordination team at the Champalimaud Foundation.