George C. McConnell

MY GREATEST ACCOMPLISHMENT: As a research scientist at Duke University, I serendipitously discovered a promising therapy for Parkinson’s disease using deep brain stimulation, which led to my first federally funded award. This work was instrumental in securing a tenure-track faculty position at Stevens Institute of Technology, which I consider my greatest accomplishment. I have the privilege of leading an interdisciplinary team of graduate, undergraduate and high school students in research studies focused on understanding and advancing novel neural stimulation therapies for neurological and psychiatric diseases.

HOW DREXEL HELPED: My professors in the School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health Systems taught me the importance of studying physiology from a systems point of view and with an engineering mindset. This is the same perspective that I teach in the classroom today. In addition to a solid engineering foundation, I benefited tremendously from the co-op program with a wide variety of research experiences — from computational neuroscience to collecting and analyzing large functional neuroimaging datasets. Those positive experiences played a pivotal role in my decision to complete a PhD in biomedical engineering at Georgia Tech.

WHERE I’ll BE IN FIVE YEARS: In five years, I hope to collaborate with clinicians, scientists and engineers to design new technologies that enable us to better understand the brain.