Harvard bioengineer Shriya Srinivasan works at the intersection of engineering, neuroscience, and medicine to create technologies that move with, listen to, and respond to the human body.

As a Schmidt Science Fellow, she expanded her research from prosthetics to the “second brain” of the gut, developing innovative neural interfaces and ingestible devices that could transform treatment for gastrointestinal disease and redefine what prosthetic technology can do.

“In my lab, we think about the interface between the human and the machine. We look at how we can use artificial stimulation systems and reconstructive surgical techniques to perform intelligent neuromodulation [increasing, decreasing or changing nerve signalling],” explains Shriya.

The team works on treating diseases of the digestive system using swallowable devices that can take control of nerves in the gut.

Other inventions, using implantable devices, could help people with paralysis or amputated limbs regain their sense of touch, or make virtual reality (VR) more immersive.

“It’s really about understanding the nervous system and then being able to replicate its function artificially to restore or augment function.”

Describing herself as ‘a nerd at heart’, Shriya spent many happy hours as a child with her father tinkering with household appliances.

They would take them apart and then put them back together again.

She worked at a tech startup after high school and witnessed the development of an echocardiogram (EKG) vest that monitored heart activity through the skin.

From then on, she was hooked on biomedical engineering.

“Seeing how you could blend engineering with clinical needs was really impactful to me as a young mind,” she recalls. “That’s how I landed here, combining my passion for medicine with what I wanted to do day in, day out.”

Soon, she was creating her own inventions.

During her PhD, at MIT’s Biomechatronics Laboratory, Shriya worked on new surgical concepts and models for patients undergoing amputation of an arm or leg.

These are known as the Agonist-Antagonist Myoneural Interface and include Shriya’s own invention, the Cutaneous Mechanoneural Interface.

Within the patient’s residual limb, these ingenious constructs reconfigure the nerve, muscle and skin tissues.

Electrodes placed on, or near, the tissues can then read the signals coming from the brain that instruct the leg or arm to move, and they can also transmit signals from a bionic device back to the tissues.

These returned signals are interpreted by the brain as a sensation of touch.

This remarkable, prize-winning breakthrough was the first reliable method for relaying movement information between a prosthetic limb and the nervous system in a naturalistic way, making a bionic leg feel more like a normal part of the body.

“I had the incredible experience of seeing my developments go from the preclinical stage into humans. Now, that surgery has been done in more than 80 patients. To see that translation was really meaningful for me,” she says.

But Shriya had already set her sights on a new frontier in terms of prostheses, the human gut.

The gut is often referred to as our ‘second brain’ because it contains hundreds of millions of neurons, and Shriya’s 2020 Schmidt Science Fellowship provided the interdisciplinary freedom to take a risk and explore this uncharted territory.

“I started thinking ‘what neural prostheses do we have for the gut?’ It’s also made of muscle and has a complex nervous system. And yet we don’t really think about prosthetics for the gut in the same way that we do for limbs,” she explains.

“The Fellowship gave me that space to really dive in and start building devices for neuromodulation in the gastrointestinal tract,” she adds.

“The Fellowship gave me that space to really dive in and start building devices for neuromodulation in the gastrointestinal tract.”

Shriya and her interdisciplinary team of clinicians and engineers designed a clever neuroprosthesis that directly interfaces with the gut’s nervous system. Its aim is to treat common oesophagus, stomach and gut motility diseases like gastroparesis (sluggish stomach contractions that cause slow emptying of the stomach) or achalasia (damage to the nerves of the oesophagus, which makes it difficult to swallow).

These so-called functional gastrointestinal disorders affect around 25% of the US population, and currently there are no targeted pharmaceutical treatments for them.

Shriya’s device works by generating waves of muscular contractions in the gut wall. It has shown promising results in pigs with paralysed guts, restoring the animals’ muscular function.

What’s more, the device can be inserted quickly and painlessly via endoscopy, sliding under a tissue layer called the mucosa to directly connect with the gut nerves.

It is flexible, like the gut itself, and it is a closed-loop system that could be customised to an individual patient’s natural gut motions. As it is made from inexpensive materials and has an eight-year lifespan, it is also cost effective and potentially accessible to anyone who needs it.

“The device can be inserted into the lining of the gut and it can take over the function of the neural and the muscular signalling. It can respond to food entering the tract and then create the peristaltic movements that move food down the tract,” explains Shriya.

“We noticed that it also has the capability to create a metabolic response and modulate glucose levels and ghrelin, which is the hunger hormone, and even hormones like GLP-1. If we develop this further, it could have a profound impact on the quality of life for patients.”

Fast forward to 2025, and Shriya is an Assistant Professor at Harvard, leading her own lab. She is working on some science fiction-like inventions, including swallowable devices and injectable ‘digital musculature’ tech which replaces nerves and muscles, recreating movement and sensation.

Setting up an interdisciplinary lab has been Shriya’s dream since she first saw the inspiring things they can achieve as a graduate on the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology.

But it hasn’t all been plain sailing. Finding a common language to converse fluently about very different fields, and meaningful translation from clinical problems to engineering and vice versa have been challenging. That’s been outweighed by the positives, though.

“The process has been really exciting for our students who get to access a very interdisciplinary research program. In my lab, they encounter a broader range of problems, tools, and teammates than one normally does. The result is a remarkable team working on uniquely positioned, clinically meaningful projects that sit close to the point of translation.”

Looking to the future, Shriya envisions closing the gap between human and machine to an even greater degree.

“That might mean interacting seamlessly with VR and AR interfaces using implanted devices we are building,” she explains.

“Imagine no longer typing on a laptop. Instead, information flows directly from your nervous system to a device and back again. For example, instead of lifting a controller or typing on a laptop, you could reach out in a virtual workspace and move objects simply by intending the motion. Your nerve signals would carry the instruction, the device would translate it, and the system would respond instantly.”

With one bionic foot placed firmly in the future, Shriya’s inventions look set to benefit many lives in the coming decades.