Hongwei Cai

[Full CV in PDF]

Academic Positions

• 2026-present: Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Intelligent Systems Engineering, Indiana University Bloomington.

Education

• 2025: Ph.D. in Intelligent Systems Engineering, Indiana University Bloomington.
• 2018: B.S. in Acoustics, Nanjing University.

Selected Publications

• H. Cai, C. Tian, L. Chen, Y. Yang, A. X. Sun, K. McCracken, J. Tchieu, M. Gu, K. Mackie, and F. Guo*. “Vascular network-inspired diffusible scaffolds for engineering functional midbrain organoids.” Cell Stem Cell, 32(5):824-837.e825, 2025.

  • Also see “Mind over scaffold: Vascular network-inspired scaffolds for functionally mature neural organoids”, Cell Biomaterials, 2025, 1(4).

• H. Cai, Z. Ao, C. Tian, Z. Wu, H. Liu, J. Tchieu, M. Gu, K. Mackie, and F. Guo*. “Brain organoid reservoir computing for artificial intelligence.” Nature Electronics, 6:1032-1039, 2023.

  • Also see “Reservoir computing with brain organoids”, Nature Electronics, 2023, 6:943-944.

  • This work was reported by over 140 media outlets worldwide, ranked in the top 1% attention at Nature Electronics, including:

    • Nature News: “‘Biocomputer’ combines lab-grown brain tissue with electronic hardware”
    • MIT Technology Review: “Human brain cells hooked up to a chip can do speech recognition”
    • GEN: “Brainoware: Organoid Neural Networks Inspire Brain-AI Hardware”
    • Daily Mail Online: “Human brain ‘organoid’ hybrid computers can be trained to learn”
    • ScienceAlert: “Human Brain Cells on a Chip Can Recognize Speech And Do Simple Math”
    • The Nation: “‘Brainoware’: Brain Cells Fused With AI Could Recognize Voices”

Full publication list: Publication. Patents: Patent. Awards, funding, and service: Award & Service.