Narayan Sankaran

Project focus: The Fellow will focus on ethical questions born from advances in neuroscience in either “brainreading” or “brain-writing.”

Narayan Sankaran is a cognitive neuroscientist and neuroethicist who recently completed his postdoctoral training in the lab of Edward Chang at the University of California San Francisco. While there, he used intracranial electrophysiological recordings taken from the human cortex to characterize the neural encoding of music and speech. Currently, Narayan is a postdoctoral fellow at the Kavli Center for Ethics, Science, and the Public at the University of California Berkeley, where he teaches a course on neuroethics and writes about the ethical implications of emerging neurotechnologies, such as brain-computer interfaces that decode sensorimotor representations from human neural activity. Starting in the Fall of 2024, Narayan will be joining the University of San Francisco as Assistant Professor of Neuroscience, where his lab will continue to pursue fundamental research questions about the human brain while simultaneously examining the ethical implications of the technologies that this research enables.