Asim Gazi received a third-place prize Best Paper Award at the IEEE-EMBS Biomedical and Health Informatics Conference, held July 27-30 in a virtual format. 

Gazi is a Ph.D. student in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), where he is a member of the Inan Research Lab. He is co-advised by Omer T. Inan, who is the Linda J. and Mark C. Smith Chair in ECE, and Christopher Rozell, who is a professor in ECE.

The title of Gazi’s award-winning paper is “Transcutaneous Cervical Vagus Nerve Stimulation Lengthens Exhalation in the Context of Traumatic Stress.” The research presented in this paper serves as a key step towards closed-loop, non-invasive, and non-pharmacologic therapy for persons affected by prior psychological trauma. The paper describes results from a double-blind clinical trial that Gazi and the team from the Inan Research Lab performed in collaboration with psychiatry, radiology, and epidemiology researchers at the Emory School of Medicine. Excitingly, the results demonstrate that in comparison to placebo stimulation, transcutaneous cervical vagus nerve stimulation (tcVNS) counteracts one manifestation of the stress-induced changes in breathing patterns: the shortening of exhalation relative to inhalation.

Gazi’s co-authors on this paper are Srirakshaa Sundararaj and Anna B. Harrison, an undergraduate researcher and Ph.D. student, respectively, in the Inan Research Lab; Nil Z. Gurel, an alumna of the Inan Research Lab and a current postdoctoral researcher at the UCLA School of Medicine; Matthew T. Wittbrodt, formerly a postdoctoral research scientist at the Emory University School of Medicine and now a senior data scientist at Northwestern University School of Medicine; Amit J. Shah, an assistant professor at the Emory Rollins School of Public Health; Viola Vaccarino, professor in the Emory Rollins School of Public Health; J. Douglas Bremner, professor in the Emory School of Medicine; and Inan, who leads the Inan Research Lab in the School of ECE.