Congratulations to Mantosh on being awarded a 4-year prestigious FNRS FRS Aspirant fellowship to complete his PhD in the CoActions Lab. The proposed research aims to investigate the causal role of sensorimotor mu-alpha phases in modulating corticospinal circuits during rest, movement preparation, and reinforcement learning. By employing cutting-edge EEG-TMS techniques, Mantosh will explore the relationship between mu-alpha phases and corticospinal excitability in young adults. Divided into three work packages, the research will provide insights into the phase-dependent modulation of corticospinal excitability during different motor contexts. The findings will contribute to our understanding of the functional relevance of mu-alpha rhythms in human motor behavior. This achievement marks an important step in advancing motor behavior research.
Congratulations to Emmanuelle for successfully defending her doctoral thesis on 13th June. Her research explored the neurophysiological abnormalities in the primary motor cortex (M1) that contribute to bradykinesia in Parkinson's disease (PD). Using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), Emmanuelle found a consistent deficit in preparatory suppression, a mechanism involved in voluntary movement preparation, in PD patients compared to healthy subjects. This deficit was independent of treatments but correlated with disease duration and motor symptom severity. Emmanuelle is now a postdoctoral research fellow at HM CINAC in Madrid, where she will continue investigating cortical excitability in PD patients using TMS and exploring non-invasive techniques like transcranial static magnetic field stimulation.
Most of the team members of the CoActions Lab attended the 15th National Congress of the Belgian Society for Neuroscience (BSN) taking place at Halles des Tanneurs in Brussels, Belgium, on June 6, 2023. Fanny Fievez, Goldy Yadav had been selected for poster presentations.
Julie was charing the welcome session.
Goldy Yadav during her poster presentation.
BSN members during the conference talks.
Team photo after the meeting.
Clara graduated in 2022 from a master degree in biomedical engineering. She then worked in a pharmaceutical industry but, after few months, she decided to switch to fundamental research and joined the CoActions lab in June 2023 to begin a PhD. She will focus on the speed-accuracy trade off during reaching movement as well as on the role of arousal in this trade off. To do so, she will use reward, transcutaneous Vagus Nerve Stimulation (tVNS) and electroencephalography (EEG).
More info about Clara can be found here: https://www.coactionslab.com/people?layout=edit&id=286
Welcome to the lab!
