Julien Grandjean (third from the left) defended his PhD thesis entitled: “Using a new double-coil TMS method to study vulnerability markers in addictions” on September 7th, 2020. If you are interested in reading his work, please click here for downloading a PDF version. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, this PhD was defended both on site and online for health safety measures. Julien would like to thank all the members of the jury for their great advice, all the people that were present on that day as well as those that helped him to achieve this work during these four years.
Emmanuelle has recently been awarded a WBI-World Excellence Grant 2020 which will fund a three-months research exchange at the HM CINAC in Madrid (Spain).
This institution is headed by Prof. J. A. OBESO., an international expert in Parkinson’s Disease (PD) research. Emmanuelle will be investigating cortical excitability and tSMS-induced plasticity in patients with PD who have undergone a treatment by MRI-guided FUS ablation.
This project will be inserted in a larger research line at HM CINAC investigating the role of the motor cortex in the physiopathology (and possibly the pathogenesis) of PD and other movement disorders, based upon large samples of patients.
Due to Covid-19, it was decided to postpone Emmanuelle’s research exchange to the autumn of 2021.
Congratulations to Thomas who got a postdoctoral grant from the Belgian Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique (FNRS) involving 3 years of funding.
The goal of his research project is to unravel the contributions of decision making and response implementation on activity in the motor system with combined TMS-EEG: During action preparation, the corticospinal pathway is broadly suppressed, a state which is overcome for selected muscles. To assist response implementation, this suppression may allow selective activation of the correct response channel to rapidly drive response execution. To assist decision making, Due to this suppression more activation might be required to reach levels of motor activity critical for response initiation, thereby extending the time available for decision making. Temporal profiles of these processes in EEG- and TMS- data will be compared between experimental conditions specifically targeting the required speed of either decisions or movements.
Congratulations to Professor Leonardo G. Cohen (National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, USA) and Professor Francesco Lacquaniti (University of Tor Vergata and IRCCS Fondazione Santa Lucia, Italy) who were awarded the title of Doctor Honoris Causa by the Faculty of Movement Science for their exceptional career in the field of motor control and rehabilitation. At this occasion, we had the great pleasure to host them at the Institute of Neuroscience of UCLouvain and show them some of the motor control labs.
