The brain makes us human. To fully understand how our brain works, we need technologies that can interface with delicate brain tissues with minimal elicited tissue response and probe brain activities across their multiple signaling mechanisms. Leveraging the thermal drawing process, conventionally used in the telecommunication industry to produce optical fibers, I worked at both MIT and Virginia Tech in my graduate studies and have shared the excitement of developing multifunctional fibers with optical, electrical and chemical modalities, yet maintained its flexibility and overall size comparable to human hairs (Y. Guo*, ACS Nano, 2017, S. Park, Y. Guo, Nature Communications, 2017). In addition, I also further combined fibers with the semiconductor-based biochemical sensors to realize label-free chemical imaging in deep brain structures (Y. Guo* et al, PLoS ONE, 2020, Y. Guo* et al, Biosensors and Bioelectronics, 2020). 
In the year of 2019, I built up my own thermal drawing system at Tohoku University, which enables my independent multimodal fiber research. In FRIS, I have been collaborating closely with neuroscientists for advancing fibers in brain studies. In addition, I am driven to further extend the functional boundary of such fibers. In particular, I would like to incorporate multiplexed chemical sensing modalities into the fibers, which will help resolve the complexity of in-brain chemical signaling with high spatial, temporal and chemical resolutions. With well-established collaboration between Professor Fabien Sorin from EPFL and Assistant Professor Hiroya Abe from FRIS, we are working on the new composite based fibers for chemical sensing in the brain. 
Such effort in advancement of technologies opens a new window that allows us to look into brain functions in unprecedented details.