Meet the jury: Multimodal Approaches to Studying Human Movement by prof Charlotte Stagg

Multimodal Approaches to Studying Human Movement

How we learn new motor skills, such as learning to play the piano or play tennis, is a question of fundamental importance to everyday life. It also has direct relevance to how we might re-learn to move our hands after a brain injury such as a stroke. However, the neuroplastic mechanisms supporting learning occur across multiple spatial and temporal scales; from the synapse to the network and from effects lasting seconds to those lasting months or even years, making understanding these processes complex.
Here, prof Stagg will discuss recent studies from her group studying the physiological basis of motor plasticity in vivo, in particular how changes across a wide range of spatial scales may interact to support functional improvements. To this end they have combined advanced neuroimaging, including MR Imaging, MR Spectroscopy and MEG, with non-invasive brain stimulation in humans.
Taken together, these studies provide convergent evidence that changes in local and network-level inhibitory processing is a key component of motor learning. Prof Stagg will discuss how one can use the information gained to optimise non-invasive brain stimulation approaches with the ultimate aim of enhancing functional improvements post-stroke.

About the speaker

Dr Charlotte (Charlie) Stagg is Professor of Human Neurophysiology in the Department of Clinical Neurosciences and the Beale Fellow in Medicine at St Hilda’s College, within the University of Oxford, UK.

Charlie initially trained in Physiology and Medicine at the University of Bristol. She completed her DPhil at the Oxford Centre for Functional MRI of the Brain (FMRIB), University of Oxford, where she used advanced neuroimaging and non-invasive brain stimulation approaches to study how the brain learns new motor skills. She was then awarded a Junior Research Fellowship at St Edmund Hall in Oxford, continuing to be based at FMRIB for her post-doctoral work, with research periods at University College London and the University of Miami, USA.

Charlie’s inter-disciplinary group was founded in 2014 and uses multi-modal neuroimaging and brain stimulation approaches to understand motor plasticity, both in the context of learning new motor skills and regaining function after a stroke. Her work has two overarching themes: to understand the mechanisms underpinning human motor learning, and to use that understanding to develop novel therapeutic approaches for acquired brain injuries. Her group’s work is funded by awards from the MRC, BBSRC, EPSRC and the Wellcome Trust.

Registration: Please register until 16/10/2024 via https://forms.gle/1U5sbTC1WL1fMwRy6
Joining online: Joining the hybrid meeting online will be possible. A link will be provided upon registration.

Contact for further questions:
melina<dot>hehl<at>kuleuven<dot>be