Tyler R Clites
University of California-Los Angeles, CA·Biomedical Engineering·Early-career
When injury, stroke or disease damages the body's moving parts, current treatments often fail to bring back natural movement. A paralyzed eyelid can leave the eye exposed and painful.
- Fields
Biomedical Engineering
Engineering
Neuroscience
- Topics
facial paralysis
blink restoration
eyelid
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Measure how segmental activation of the eyelid-closing muscle produces spontaneous, reflexive and forced blinks in people without paralysis, using intramuscular EMG (electrical recordings inside the muscle) and high-definition 3D eyelid tracking.
- Build a mechanistic neuromuscular model of the eyelid from paired muscle-activation and eyelid-motion data, to predict where and when a future neuroprosthesis should deliver stimulation.
- Repeat the eyelid recordings in people with partial facial paralysis to determine how abnormal muscle activation compromises blink and eyelid closure.
- Develop a compliant limb reconstruction (CLR) pipeline that generates joint- and pathology-specific mechanical properties for flexible implants that correct disrupted joint compliance (how tissue bends under load).
- Design, fabricate and validate compliant implants for two limb pathologies with unmet clinical needs, gathering data to support early feasibility studies in human patients.
More about the research
A damaged joint can leave a limb alive but unusable. This research combines surgery and mechanical design, an approach the PI calls "anatomics," in which the body and an implanted device are designed together. One project studies how the nervous system drives eyelid motion so that future neuroprostheses (implanted devices that stimulate nerves or muscles) can restore a natural blink. The other designs flexible implants that correct the mechanics of damaged joints.
Why it matters
People with facial paralysis from stroke or other neurological disorders could one day receive neuroprostheses that restore a natural blink, protecting the eye, easing pain and supporting vision and confidence. Patients whose injured or diseased joints leave a limb painful and nonfunctional could gain flexible implants that restore movement and may help avoid unnecessary amputation.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Lee Miller
Northwestern University, IL·Biomedical Engineering
Build decoders that predict intended muscle activity (EMG) from primary motor cortex spiking recorded in humans with high-level spinal cord injury, trained with EMG, hand posture and force data from able-bodied people doing the same actions.
Samuel Sober
Emory University, GA·Neuroscience
Design new Myomatrix electrode arrays that record single motor unit activity from a wide range of species, body sizes and muscle types. The design builds on earlier arrays used in mice and songbirds.
Kenneth Weber
Stanford University, CA·Neuroscience
Improve spinal cord functional MRI with a 64-channel head-neck coil, segment-based alignment of scans and surface electromyography (muscle recordings) to remove motion noise, while mapping how the cord encodes touch intensity in 30 volunteers.
The school
University of California-Los Angeles: 84 labs on PI Pages, $1.9B a year on research, 803 research doctorates a year.
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