Principal Investigator Maryam Parsa, Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, College of Engineering and Computing (CEC), and co-Principal Investigator Giorgio Ascoli, Distinguished Professor of Bioengineering and Neuroscience, College of Science, received funding from the U.S. Department of Energy for the project: “GAINS: Generalizable, Analog, Izhikevich-Based Neuromorphic Spintronics for Next-Generation Computing.” PI-Parsa is leading this collaborative project with two other co-PIs from University of Wisconsin–Madison (Prof. Akhilesh Jaiswal) and Northwestern University (Prof. Pedram Khalili).
The researchers primarily aim to systematically incorporate biologically realistic temporal dynamics into scalable, neuromorphic platforms. GAINS explicitly targets enhanced computational performance, improved generalizability, robustness against variations, and superior privacy in neuromorphic systems.
The potential impact of GAINS is substantial, fundamentally shifting the neuromorphic computing paradigm by enabling scalable hardware solutions that authentically replicate critical aspects of brain dynamics. By overcoming the limitations inherent in current neuromorphic platforms, GAINS paves the way toward robust, energy-efficient, and biologically plausible computing systems, ultimately benefiting next-generation scientific, industrial, and edge-computing applications.
Parsa and Ascoli received $156,667 from the U.S. Department of Energy for the first year of this project, which began in Sept. 2025. This is a two-year project with total support of $500,000.