Dr. Lior Halmstad

Biography

Lior Halmstad joined Veyra Institute in 2019 following a postdoctoral appointment at the Kessmar Neural Technology Laboratory, where she developed stretchable polymer electrode arrays for chronic cortical recording in freely moving subjects. She received her PhD in biomedical engineering from the Alderton Institute of Technology in 2016, with a dissertation on closed-loop stimulation protocols for suppressing pathological beta oscillations in Parkinson's disease models. Her undergraduate studies in materials science were completed at the University of Teldrim, graduating with distinction in 2011.

At Veyra, Halmstad established the Neural Engineering Group to bridge the gap between advanced materials, signal processing, and clinical neuroscience. The group designs and characterises next-generation flexible electrode arrays that conform to the curved surfaces of living neural tissue with minimal inflammatory response, and pairs them with real-time decoding pipelines capable of inferring intended motor commands or cognitive states from multi-unit activity. A particular focus is adaptive deep-brain stimulation: rather than delivering fixed-frequency pulses, the group's systems monitor biomarkers extracted from local field potentials and adjust stimulation parameters on a cycle-by-cycle basis — an approach that has demonstrated substantially reduced side effects in pre-clinical trials. The group's hardware–software co-design framework NeuralLoop underpins two ongoing clinical-translation collaborations with regional neurological centres.

Halmstad is a member of the Veyra Institute Ethics Committee for Human Research and chairs the CNS division's equipment and facilities sub-committee. She has secured four externally funded projects totalling approximately 5.7 million cr in direct costs, and currently supervises four doctoral students and two postdoctoral researchers. She co-teaches the graduate module Neural Interfaces: Materials to Systems each spring semester and contributes to the Institute's short course programme in translational neurotechnology.

Research interests

Selected publications

1. Halmstad L, Drennan T, Yusuf A. "Adaptive closed-loop deep-brain stimulation driven by local field potential biomarkers: a pre-clinical validation study." Journal of Neural Engineering and Therapeutics, 12(1): 44–61, 2025. VEYRA-DOI: 10.veyra/VX-2504
2. Halmstad L, Osei-Lante K. "NeuralLoop: a hardware–software co-design framework for real-time closed-loop neuromodulation." Proceedings of the Kessmar Symposium on Neural Engineering (KSNE), pp. 77–91, 2024. VEYRA-DOI: 10.veyra/VX-2418
3. Drennan T, Halmstad L, Wiertz S. "Stretchable PEDOT:OSS electrode arrays with sub-micron impedance for chronic cortical recording." Advanced Neural Materials, 9(6): 882–897, 2023. VEYRA-DOI: 10.veyra/VX-2322
4. Halmstad L, Steiner R, Bekele S. "Decoding perceptual confidence from prefrontal local field potentials during evidence accumulation." Cerebral Dynamics, 7: 101–114, 2022. VEYRA-DOI: 10.veyra/VX-2211
5. Yusuf A, Halmstad L. "Beta-band suppression latency as a control signal for on-demand deep-brain stimulation in movement disorders." Neurotechnology Letters, 5(3): 198–210, 2022. VEYRA-DOI: 10.veyra/VX-2219
6. Halmstad L, Wiertz S. "Biocompatible substrate selection for long-term implantable neural arrays: a systematic comparison." Journal of Biomedical Interface Science, 14(2): 73–88, 2021. VEYRA-DOI: 10.veyra/VX-2106

Current group members

Postdoctoral researchers

• Dr. Tomas Drennan — flexible electrode fabrication, polymer bioelectronics
• Dr. Kwame Osei-Lante — real-time neural decoding, embedded signal processing

Doctoral students

• Annika Yusuf — closed-loop deep-brain stimulation for movement disorders (Year 3)
• Sanne Wiertz — biocompatible substrate engineering for chronic implants (Year 3)
• Ezra Malkiel — motor intent decoding from multi-electrode array data (Year 2)
• Frida Calsson — adaptive stimulation parameter optimisation using reinforcement learning (Year 1)