Speaker: Kai Miller, M.D., Ph.D.

Title: Paths to Patient-Specific Implanted Neuromodulation for Psychiatric Illness 

Introduction: Kai Miller is a pediatric, functional, and epilepsy neurosurgeon at Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. He is a native Californian who attended UC San Diego, where he played on the intercollegiate tennis team. He later attended the University of Washington for graduate school, obtaining a PhD in Physics, an MD, and a second PhD in Neuroscience. After completing his neurosurgery residency at Stanford University in California, Kai was named as the 2018 Van Wagenen fellow (awarded to one neurosurgeon annually). He completed 3 clinical fellowships at Stanford and Utrecht (Netherlands) in epilepsy, deep-brain stimulation, and tumor resection in children and adults.  Dr. Miller joined the neurosurgery staff at Mayo Clinic in Rochester in 2019. He was board-certified in 2023 and became full professor in 2024. In addition to his clinical practice, Dr. Miller studies basic human neurophysiology and clinical translation for cybernetics, epilepsy and functional neurosurgery. His work has defined and discovered broadband spectral signatures of cortical function, identified novel motor circuit anatomy, and advanced brain–computer interface technologies (BCIs). He developed novel analytical frameworks for interpreting electrical stimulation responses, now widely applied in neuromodulation research. Committed to open science, he created public libraries of electrocorticography data and surgical mapping tools. His contributions span motor physiology, perception, plasticity, and aiming to restore function through innovative algorithms and neurotechnologies. Kai’s group, the Cybernetics and Motor Physiology Laboratory, is focused on the creation of new tools to 1) control cybernetic prostheses, 2) induce brain plasticity after injury, and 3) intervene with distributed circuits in neuropsychiatric disease and movement dysfunction.  

Learning Objectives: 
Upon completion of this activity, participants should be able to:

1. Describe 3 basic classes of electrophysiological biomarkers 

2. Describe how stereoelectroencephalography discovers basic targets and therapies for permanent stimulation 

3. Name 3 psychiatric indications for which implanted neuromodulation has been used as a therapy 

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TRANSCRIPT
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