Richard A. Normann is a Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Bioengineering at the University of Utah. He is known for inventing the Utah array in-vivo electrode array for brain–computer interfaces and is presently on the advisory committee of the White House BRAIN Initiative. He received his PhD in 1973 from UC Berkeley in electrical engineering. He received an honorary doctorate in 2012 from Miguel Hernández University in Elche, Spain.

The Utah array was first developed, under his guidance and this technology is currently in use at other centres around the world, where it provides a vital link between the central nervous systems of rats, cats, monkeys and other laboratory animals, and the computers used to study their brain patterns.

Awards & Recognitions

• 2008: Bartimaeus Award - awarded by the Detroit Institute of Ophthalmology for service to the blind community through research in visual prosthesis

Experience

• Professor (1989 - 2011)

  Center for Neural Interfaces

  University of Utah

• Co-Founder & Chairman of the Board (1995 - 2002)

  Bionic Technologies, Inc. (Salt Lake City, Utah)

• Associate Professor (1982 - 1988)

  Center for Neural Interfaces

  University of Utah

• Assistant Professor (1979 - 1982)

  Department of Bioengineering

  University of Utah

• Senior Staff Fellow (1977 - 1979)

  National Institute of Neurological and Communicative Disorders and Stroke (NINDS)

  National Institutes of Health

• Staff Fellow (1974 - 1977)

  National Institute of Neurological and Communicative Disorders and Stroke (NINDS)

  National Institutes of Health

• Postdoctoral Scholar (1973 - 1974)

  Department of Biochemistry & Biophysics

  University of California, San Francisco

Education

• none, Department of Bioengineering (2014 - present)

  University of Utah

• none, Department of Bioengineering (2011 - 2014)

  Center for Neural Interfaces

  University of Utah

• PhD, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (1973)

  University of California, Berkeley