Speaking & Media

I speak about bionic vision, accessible science, and what it means to build the technology I may one day use myself. I’ve been blind since age five, and I research cortical visual prostheses at UC Santa Barbara’s Bionic Vision Lab — which makes me both the engineer and the end-user of my field. I’m available for keynotes, conference talks, panels, podcasts, university seminars, and corporate accessibility events, in English, Portuguese, or Spanish, in person or remote.

To book me: email lucas@braillemind.com with the event, date, format, and audience. I usually reply within two business days.

Topics I speak about

• The engineer and the patient are the same person. What bionic vision can and can’t do today, why restoring sight is harder than headlines suggest, and what it’s like to build implants for a population you belong to.
• Designing with us, not for us. Lessons from our research on what implantees actually want from visual prostheses — and why assistive technology fails when disabled users are left out of the room. Based on my co-first-authored study in Translational Vision Science & Technology.
• Doing science without sight. How I read papers, write code, analyze data, and run experiments as a blind neuroscientist — the tools, the workarounds, and what labs gain when they include disabled scientists.
• From Brazil to the Bionic Vision Lab. My path from a blind kid in São Paulo with few accessible resources to the first blind student in Carnegie Mellon’s Biomedical Engineering department and a PhD in visual prosthetics.

Selected past talks & media

• 11th World Blindness Summit (São Paulo, 2025) — invited talk, The Vision of a Blind Scientist, with Michael Beyeler.
• NIH National Library of Medicine — guest essay, A Future Where Blindness Is No Barrier: The Smart Bionic Eye (2024), and the NNLM Discovery podcast.
• Tumble Science Podcast for Kids — featured scientist, How Does Vision Work? (2025), also released in Spanish on Tumble en Español.
• Vision Sciences Society — invited speaker, Enhancing Accessibility Workshop (2024), and research talk (2024).
• IEEE VIS — co-organizer of the AccessViz workshop on accessible data visualization (2024, 2025).
• What is The Future for Cities? — panel on neurodiversity and urban design (2024).

Bios you can copy

Short (35 words): Lucas Gil Nadolskis is a blind neuroscientist building bionic vision. A PhD student in UC Santa Barbara’s Bionic Vision Lab, he researches cortical visual prostheses — technology that could one day restore his own sight.

Medium (90 words): Lucas Gil Nadolskis is a PhD student in Dynamical Neuroscience at UC Santa Barbara’s Bionic Vision Lab, where he works on cortical visual prostheses. Blind since age five, he is both a researcher in sight restoration and a member of the community it serves. He holds a computer science degree from the University of Minnesota and a master’s in biomedical engineering from Carnegie Mellon, where he was the department’s first blind student. He served on Neuralink’s BlindSight Consumer Advisory Board and co-organizes the AccessViz workshop at IEEE VIS. He writes at braillemind.com.

For journalists

I’m available for comment on visual prostheses, brain-computer interfaces, Neuralink’s BlindSight (I served on its Consumer Advisory Board, 2024–2026), and accessibility in science and technology. To the Bionic Vision Lab’s knowledge, I’m the only blind researcher working in sight restoration. Headshots available on request.