Dr. Yurii Vlasov is a Grainger Engineering Breakthroughs Initiative (GEBI) Founder Professor of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has tenure with the departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Materials Science and Engineering, and Bioengineering, as well as the Carle Illinois College of Medicine. At Illinois, he established the Integrated Neurotechnology lab devoted to development of advanced engineering approaches aimed at reverse engineering of the brain circuits. The major themes include development of silicon-based nanofluidic and nanophotonic neural probes, in vivo neurobiological experiments with massive recording and manipulation of brain activity, and, lastly, development of machine-learning algorithms to analyze large neural datasets.

Prior to joining the U of I in 2016, Dr. Vlasov held various research and managerial positions at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in New York, where he led broad company-wide efforts in integrated silicon nanophotonics and more recently in neuromorphic computing architectures. He initiated the Silicon Nanophotonics project in 2001 and managed it for more than 15 years from its early fundamental research stage up to commercial manufacturing of optical transceivers for large-scale datacenters and supercomputers. The technology has been fully qualified and deployed for commercial production at GlobalFoundries. 

Prior to joining IBM in 2001, Dr. Vlasov developed semiconductor nanophotonics at the N.E.C. Research Institute in Princeton, New Jersey, and at the Strasbourg IPCMS Institute in France. For over a decade, he was also a research scientist with the Ioffe Institute of Physics and Technology in St. Petersburg, Russia, working on optics of nanostructured semiconductors. He received his M.S. from the University of St. Petersburg (1988) and Ph.D from the Ioffe Institute (1994), both in physics.

Through our research, we aim to uncover the principles of brain computations that form the basis of perception and guide complex behavior. Our vision is to integrate engineering, systems neuroscience, and data analytics to advance our knowledge of the inner workings of the brain. The interdisciplinary projects in the lab can be categorized into three main directions: Neuro-engineering, Neuro-biology, and Neuro-informatics. Neuro-engineering is focused on developing advanced neural probes to interrogate and manipulate the brain using nanotechnology approaches. These novel tools are used in Neuro-biology experiments to record massive datasets of brain activity in live animals during active navigation in virtual reality. Development of machine learning analytical methods in Neuro-informatics provides insight into the functionality of neural circuits and systems.