What academic and clinical researchers are collaborating with Neuralink on human trials, and what are their medical credentials?
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Executive summary
Neuralink's human PRIME study is being run by the company with select partnerships at clinical sites — most notably The Miami Project to Cure Paralysis and the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine — but publicly available reporting lists few individual academic investigators and little granular credential data beyond institutional affiliations, requiring caution about naming specific clinicians involved [1] [2] [3]. Independent researchers and reporting note that Neuralink largely leads the program while working with multidisciplinary surgical teams at partner centers, and critics say conventional academic collaboration has been limited [1] [3] [4].
1. Who the trial partners are — institutions, not a laundry list of academics
Neuralink has formally selected The Miami Project to Cure Paralysis and the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine as a U.S. site for its PRIME investigational-device study, and the companies’ public statements emphasize site-level collaboration rather than naming a roster of academic co‑principal investigators [1] [2]. Neuralink’s own trial portal and promotional material position the company as the study sponsor and primary operator of the implant procedure while inviting interested participants to join a Neuralink patient registry [5] [6].
2. What the Miami Project has said — multidisciplinary teams and named institutional leaders
The Miami Project has announced that the implant procedure at its site will be “carried out by Neuralink scientists and a multidisciplinary team of neurosurgeons, neuroscientists and biomedical engineers at The Miami Project and the Miller School of Medicine,” and the project’s leadership framed the collaboration as combining its clinical research expertise with Neuralink’s technology [1] [2]. Miami’s public communications identify institutional figures — for instance, Marc Buoniconti, president of The Miami Project — endorsing the partnership and celebrating local implantation milestones, but these releases do not enumerate the surgeons’ names or list individual neurosurgical credentials in the quoted material [3].
3. What Neuralink acknowledges about clinical staffing and trial leadership
Neuralink materials and job postings over time indicate the company builds internal clinical teams (clinical trial directors/coordinators) and intends to perform the critical aspects of device implantation and device management itself while operating at clinical sites, a model repeated across public reporting and job advertisements [7] [8]. Reuters and other outlets likewise describe Neuralink as the driving operational force in the first‑in‑human feasibility study, noting the company sought to enroll a small number of patients and registered the study with government databases [9] [10].
4. Known named individuals and what the sources reveal about credentials
Reporting and institutional releases cite high‑level names such as DJ Seo (Neuralink co‑founder, president and COO) and Miami Project leadership (Marc Buoniconti, Barth A. in some releases) in the context of site partnership statements, but publicly available sources provided here do not supply a comprehensive list of the neurosurgeons, principal investigators, or their board certifications, hospital appointments, or surgical credentials — the announcements emphasize institutional affiliation and multidisciplinary teams rather than individual CVs [2] [3]. Where external academics are quoted about Neuralink (e.g., an ASU neural engineer offering perspective or clinical neuroscientists criticizing the program), those commentators are experts in the field but are not described as trial collaborators [11] [4].
5. What critics and independent researchers say about the level of academic collaboration
Independent BCI researchers and investigative coverage contend that Neuralink has worked relatively privately and that conventional, transparent academic collaboration has been limited — a criticism that bears on the question of which academics are formally collaborating versus who is commenting on the program [4]. Reporting about earlier animal testing controversies and regulatory scrutiny further underscores why outside researchers want more detailed disclosure about investigators and their clinical credentials before treating Neuralink’s site announcements as equivalent to the usual academic multicenter investigator lists [12] [4].
6. Conclusion and limits of available reporting
The clear, verifiable answer is that the principal named clinical partner publicly disclosed in the sources is The Miami Project/University of Miami, and statements describe multidisciplinary neurosurgical and neuroscience teams performing implants alongside Neuralink staff, but the supplied sources do not publish a full roster of collaborating academic or clinical investigators with explicit medical credentials, board certifications, or hospital appointments — therefore any attempt to produce a complete, named list of individual researchers and their credentials would exceed what the cited reporting supports [1] [2] [3] [9].