SEOUL, November 06 (AJP) - A researcher at a South Korean university has won a lead role on a European Research Council Synergy Grant for the first time, KAIST said Friday. The six-year project will study how the brain moves the body in monkeys that walk, climb and forage freely.
Jang Kyung-in, a professor in KAIST's Department of Mechanical Engineering, is one of three principal investigators on the project, called NeuroEthoPrim. The European Research Council (ERC) will provide 9,681,258 euros. Of that, 3,096,838 euros will go to KAIST, which put its share at about 5 billion won.
The 2026 round drew 957 proposals, the most since the program began in 2012, according to figures the ERC released when the call closed. KAIST said 48 of the 938 proposals that went through review were funded, a success rate of 5.1 percent.
The ERC is the European Union's main funder of basic research. Its Synergy Grants bring together two to four lead researchers to work on a problem none of them could solve alone, with up to 10 million euros over six years.
South Korea takes part in Horizon Europe, the EU's research program, only through its second pillar, which funds joint projects on industrial and global challenges. For the ERC, which sits in the first pillar, South Korea counts as an outside country. Synergy rules allow each team only one lead researcher based outside the EU and its associated countries, and Jang fills that place.
Luca Bonini, a professor of psychobiology at Italy's University of Parma, coordinates the project. The third lead researcher is Silvestro Micera, who holds posts at the Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa and at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne. The budget is split almost evenly among Parma, Sant'Anna and KAIST.
Most of what scientists know about how the brain controls movement comes from experiments in which an animal's head is held still while it repeats a single trained action, such as reaching for an object. These setups produce clean brain signals but reveal little about the whole-body movements of ordinary life.
In a sensor-equipped enclosure called the NeuroEthoRoom, the team will record activity across the sensory and motor regions on both sides of the monkeys' brains. At the same time, it will measure muscle activity, touch through skin-mounted sensors, and the force the animals put on the floor and on handles.
The researchers will work in two directions. Decoding means reading the brain's signals to learn what movement an animal intends. Encoding means turning outside information, such as pressure on a fingertip, into electrical signals the brain can take in as a sense of touch.
They will also test cause and effect. The team plans to temporarily block a pathway that carries sensory signals to the brain's outer layer, which disrupts the animals' movement. It will then use tiny electrical pulses through implanted electrodes to restore the disrupted activity and check whether normal movement returns.
The data will train an artificial intelligence model known as a foundation model. Large language models learn the rules of language from vast amounts of text. This model is meant to learn rules of movement that hold across individual animals.
Jang leads the hardware. His lab will build electrodes shaped to each animal's brain, signal-processing chips, wireless power systems, skin-mounted sensors and a wireless drug-delivery device.
Jang joined KAIST this year after a decade at the Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology (DGIST). There, his team built a fully implanted brain recorder that runs without batteries or wires. It was reported in Nature Biomedical Engineering and recorded signals from a monkey moving freely over one month.
"The starting point of this research is uncovering how the brain connects sensation and movement when the body moves freely," Jang said.
His lab plans to apply the results to a brain chip called ALEX and an operating system called LUCAS. ENSIDE, a startup Jang founded in 2019, would pursue commercialization. The long-term aim is a platform through which a person with paralysis could control a smartphone or wheelchair with brain signals.
None of that has been shown in people. The grant funds basic research, not product development, and KAIST said any use in humans would require further studies and testing for safety and effectiveness.
The project is scheduled to start in the first half of 2027, once the grant agreement is signed. Its animal experiments will follow the EU directive on animals used for scientific purposes (2010/63/EU) and must be approved by each institution's animal ethics committee.
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