Polina Anikeeva is the Matoula S. Salapatas Professor and Department Head of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT, where she also holds appointments in Brain and Cognitive Sciences and directs the K. Lisa Yang Brain-Body Center. Her research focuses on developing minimally invasive, biologically inspired tools to study and modulate brain-body communication. Anikeeva has received numerous honors, including the NIH Pioneer Award and the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise.

Polina's talk, Bioelectronics to Probe Brain-Body Physiology, focuses on how the mammalian nervous system operates across diverse spatial and temporal scales. To study how molecular and cellular signals influence behavior and disease, her group develops tissue-compatible tools that mimic biological complexity. Using polymer engineering, fiber drawing, and microelectronics, they create scalable, fiber-based devices to record and modulate neural activity in the central and autonomic nervous systems of behaving rodents. These tools help uncover gut-brain circuit roles in both metabolic regulation and complex behaviors. They also design magnetic nanotransducers that convert magnetic fields into localized biological signals, enabling deep-tissue, wireless modulation of neural circuits. This approach allows the group to influence reward, motivation, and motor function in models of neurological disorders.