This Monday, October 20th, in Leuven, the 16th Annual Meeting of the Belgian Society for Neuroscience took place, with Prof. Julie Duqué as President of the event. Celebrating its 30th anniversary, this event was a great opportunity for the neuroscience community in Belgium to share ideas, hypotheses, and research findings.
Throughout the day, participants had the chance to attend inspiring talks by Prof. Dr. Friedhelm Hummel (“Beyond the Surface: Noninvasive Deep-Brain Stimulation to Boost Cognition in Health and Neurological Disorders”), Prof. Dr. Karin Amunts (“Charting the Human Brain”), and Prof. Dr. Senne Braem (“Mental Processes Underlying Flexible, Goal-Directed Behavior”).
It was also a great occasion for several members of the CoActions Lab, Clara Braconnier, Clara Masson, Mantosh Patnaik, Ronan Denyer, and Zainab Choumane, to present their research projects to the Belgian neuroscience community.
Congratulations to Ronan who was awarded a 3-year postdoctoral fellowship grant by Le Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique!
Ronan’s project is concerned with identifying neural sources of preparatory inhibition. The use of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) in combination with Instructed Delay Choice Reaction Time Tasks in humans has led to the discovery of preparation related suppression of corticospinal tract excitability, so-called “preparatory suppression”. Despite these advances, motor evoked potentials (MEPs) produced by single pulse TMS over primary motor cortex (M1) have a limited ability to test competing perspectives on the functional role of preparatory suppression since they represent a summed approximation of many sources of inhibition and facilitation within the brain. Ronan has proposed a set of experiments organized in 3 work packages (WP) using TMS and electroencephalography (EEG) and transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation (tVNS) to improve understanding of the neural source of preparatory suppression. Ronan believes this will aid in future efforts to parse out the function(s) of the effect in behaviour, for both healthy and clinical populations.
Professor Jonathan Tsay was invited to give a talk on June 4th at 12:30pm, which was held at Auditoire Maisin, Louvain-en-Woluwe. He is a distinguished young scientist in the field of motor control. After completing his PhD at UC Berkeley under Rich Ivry, he pursued a postdoctoral fellowship at Cambridge with Tamar Makin. He is now establishing his own lab at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
His presentation was titled with "Behavioral, Neuropsychological, and Computational Perspectives on Sensorimotor Learning", exploring the behavioral, neuropsychological, and computational dimensions of sensorimotor learning, with a special focus on his innovative work developing online experimental environments.
Following the talks, we enjoyed a delightful dinner with JT at a beautiful venue overlooking the scenic views of Brussels. The dinner provided an excellent opportunity for lively discussions and networking in a relaxed setting.
Mantosh and Clara from the CoActions Lab made a notable impact with their presentations at the IoNS Young Researchers’ Day, held at the Brussels Woluwe campus of UCLouvain.
The event brought together promising young postdoc or phd students from the Institute of Neuroscience of UCLouvain to showcase their interesting research. Our PhD students delivered poster presentations on their latest work, receiving praise and recognition from peers and experts in the field.
This participation not only highlights the innovative research being conducted at CoActions Lab but also underscores our commitment to fostering young talent and advancing scientific knowledge.
