2018 Conference

Professor Yoshikazu Ugawa is now the Director and Professor of the Department of Neurology, and Vice President of Fukushima Medical University.

He enjoyed the disaster of the 2011 earthquake in Japan and still lives in Fukushima. Professor Ugawa graduated from Tokyo University in 1978 and studied physiology of movement disorders under Professor Marsden and Professor Rothwell in Queen Square, London in 1987-1990 after which, he returned to Tokyo University. He has been at the present position in Fukushima since 2007.

Professor Ugawa is interested in clinical neurophysiology and is one of the pioneers of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). He started to study pathophysiological mechanisms underlying various involuntary movements, especially myoclonus, using EEG, evoked potentials and MEGs. After the invention of TMS and neuroimaging techniques, he also used those newly developed methods for this purpose. He extended the target disorders to Parkinson’s disease and related disorders. After the invention of repetitive TMS (rTMS), he studied neuroplasticity in humans and developed a new plasticity induction method – quadripulse stimulation (QPS). In addition to studies of normal plasticity, he applied the plasticity induction method to the treatment of neurological disorders and he is now developing new treatments using rTMS for movement disorders, especially Parkinson’s disease.

Kate Watkins is currently a full professor in cognitive neuroscience at the University of Oxford.

Kate completed her PhD with Faraneh Vargha-Khadem and David Gadian at University College London. Her doctoral work used neuropsychology and brain imaging to study members of the KE family who had a mutation in the gene FOXP2, which causes impairments in speech and language. She identifies structural and functional abnormalities in cortical and subcortical motor areas in affected family members. For her postdoctoral research, she moved to the Montreal Neurological Institute to work with Tomas Paus. There she used TMS with EMG recordings from the lip and with PET imaging to study the role of the speech motor system in speech perception.

Kate returned to the UK and the University of Oxford working first at the FMRIB Centre and then in the Department of Experimental Psychology and St. Anne’s College. She established the Speech & Brain Research Group in Oxford, which uses brain imaging and brain stimulation alone and in combination to study sensorimotor interactions for speech. Her research involves studies of speech and language in typical adults, children and special populations with speech and language disorders, such as stuttering and developmental language disorder. Recently, her team completed a randomised controlled trial showing that tDCS can enhance fluency in people who stutter. A new trial is underway using imaging of the brain and vocal tract, MEG and TMS to measure the outcomes of the tDCS and speech training intervention.

Zoe Kourtzi is Professor of Experimental Psychology and Cognitive Computational Neuroscience at the Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge and a Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute. Her work aims to understand the role of lifelong learning and experience in enabling humans of all ages to translate sensory experience into complex decisions and adaptive behaviours. To understand the link between individual learning ability and brain plasticity, she takes a cross-disciplinary approach that synthesises methods from behavioural science (cognitive testing), neuroscience (brain imaging) and computational modelling (machine learning). After completing her PhD on object recognition at Rutgers University, Zoe started her work on human brain imaging as a postdoctoral fellow at MIT and Harvard University. She then received a McDonnell-Pew award to combine animal and human brain imaging and moved to the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics as a Senior Research Scientist. She moved to the University of Birmingham as a Chair in Brain Imaging in 2005, and to the University of Cambridge in 2013.

After obtaining his PhD in Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology from l’Université de Montréal, Prof. Jean-François Lepage completed a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford School of Medicine, where he studied rare genetic disorders, followed by a second fellowship at Massachusetts General Hospital to study the use of non-invasive brain stimulation in pediatric populations.

Jean-François’ research program aims to understand how environmental, genetic, and epigenetic factors interact with and influence human brain development. He is now an associate professor appointed with the department of Pediatrics (Neurology) at Université de Sherbrooke.

Dr Alex Casson is a senior lecturer in the Sensing, Imaging and Signal Processing group in the school of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Manchester. His research focuses on non-invasive bioelectronics interfaces: the design and application of wearable sensors, and ‘conformal sensors’, for human body monitoring and data analysis from highly artefact prone naturalistic situations. This work is highly multi-disciplinary and he has research expertise in:

• Ultra low power microelectronic circuit design (at the discrete and fully custom microchip levels).
• Sensor signal processing for power constrained motion artefact rich environments.
• Personalised device manufacture using 3D printing and inkjet printing.

He has particular interests in precision devices for closed loop bioelectronic interventions: those which are tailored to the individual by personalised manufacturing via printing; and tailored interventions by adjusting treatments using data driven responses/outputs from real-time signal processing. Dr Casson’s ultra low power sensors work is mainly for medical applications, with a strong background in EEG and transcranial current stimulation. These applications focus on both mental health situations including epilepsy, sleep disorders, stroke, Parkinson’s disease and autism, and physical health/rehabilitation applications including diabetic foot ulceration.

Dr Casson gained his undergraduate degree from the University of Oxford in 2006 where he read Engineering Science specialising in Electronic Engineering (MEng). He completed his PhD from Imperial College London in 2010, winning the prize for best doctoral thesis in electrical and electronic engineering. Dr Casson worked as a research associate and research fellow at Imperial College until 2013 when he joined the faculty at the University of Manchester. He is good clinical practice certified and is a site miner for the Manchester Integrating Medicine and Innovative Technology (MIMIT) scheme for systematically connecting clinicians and engineers to address unmet clinical needs. His work has resulted in 84 publications since 2007, with their impact reflected by a substantial number of invited talks (20 since 2014, at 6 different UK universities, and institutions in Germany and the USA) and invited papers (7 since 2014, all in international conferences/journals). This is further evidenced by awards including the 2013 IET JA Lodge prize for early career biomedical engineers and the 2016 Rogue Resolutions challenge award for neuromodulation with a total prize value of £74,000. Dr Casson is currently a Senior Member of the IEEE, Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and vice-chair of the Institution of Engineering and Technology’s healthcare technologies network.

Dr Camilla Nord is an Investigator Scientist at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, University of Cambridge. After reading for a degree in Physiology and Psychology at the University of Oxford, she completed her doctoral training at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London under the supervision of Profs. Jonathan Roiser and Sven Bestmann, where she ran a clinical trial measuring the neural, cognitive, and clinical effects of frontal cortex stimulation combined with psychological therapy in depression and investigated putative ‘biomarkers’ of response. In 2017, she took up a post-doctoral position in the lab of Dr Valerie Voon at the University of Cambridge Department of Psychiatry working on novel dual-coil transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) approaches. Currently, she is developing a programme of research with Prof. Tim Dalgleish investigating the neurocomputational mechanisms of somatic and emotional symptoms in psychiatric disorders, using multimodal approaches, including computational modelling, brain stimulation, brain imaging, and pharmacology.

Dr Isabel Glover is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology

Isabel Glover graduated from Cambridge University with a degree in Natural Sciences. She completed her PhD at Stuart Baker’s lab at Newcastle University, and is funded by the Reece Foundation. Her research focuses on the contribution of reticulospinal pathways to movement, which she has investigated using electrophysiological techniques in both humans and non-human primates.

James Bonaiuto completed his PhD in 2010 with Michael Arbib at the University of Southern California, developing computational models of reach and grasp performance and observation. James then performed postdoctoral research with Richard Andersen at the California Institute of Technology using computational modeling and reversible muscimol inactivation with nonhuman primates to develop an integrative model of effector- and value-based decision making. He then moved to University College London, working with Sven Bestmann and Gareth Barnes, using tDCS and EEG to study action-based and perceptual decision making, and action selection. There he helped pioneer the use of subject-specific head-casts for high precision MEG, and was the first to show, non-invasively in the human brain, the laminar- and frequency-specific correlates of action selection.

He is currently Charge de Recherche at the Insitut des Sciences Cognitives, Marc Jeannerod, CNRS.

Marc Bächinger studied Biology at ETH Zürich with a focus on Neuroscience. During his Master’s programme he carried out various psychophysical experiments in the field of visual and auditory perception. His Master’s thesis investigated the perception of visual stimuli — Glass patterns — rendered invisible by dynamic masking (motion-induced blindness). Parallel to his Master’s programme, he served as an intern at the University Hospital Zürich in the Laboratory of Experimental Audiology. There, he developed software for psychophysical experiments with patients who have cochlear implants. After finishing his Master’s Degree in 2012 he completed an internship at the Psychiatric University Hospital in Zurich as a research assistant. He recently obtained his PhD at the Neural Control of Movement Lab where he investigated different interventions to modulate activity within the sensorimotor system, and was one of the first to apply a concurrent tACS-fMRI approach where the stimulation waveforms were tailored to the individual’s EEG activity. As of January 2018 he is continuing his research in the lab as a postdoctoral researcher. 

Research Interests

Dr. Bächinger has a great interest in advancing the understanding and application of non-invasive neurostimulation in combination with multimodal neuroimaging approaches. During his PhD, he studied different methods to modulate activity within the sensorimotor system and received a Merit Award from the Organization of Human Brain mapping and the Volker Henn Poster Award from the Swiss Society of Neuroscience for his work on combining tACS and resting-state fMRI. Currently, his research focuses on the neurophysiological basis of performance fatigability in humans, using a multi-modal approach including connectivity analysis of fMRI and EEG data, as well as non-invasive brain stimulation methods (TMS & tDCS). He is especially interested in determining which neurophysiological markers are associated with fatigability and how to apply interventions tailored to those markers to alleviate fatigability.

Sophie Esterer completed her undergraduate degree in Psychology at the University of Vienna. She then gained her Masters degree in Cognitive Neuroscience working with Prof. Ole Jensen at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour.

She is currently doing a PhD at the Cardiff University Brain Research Imaging Centre (CUBRIC), supervised by Dr David McGonigle. Her research is co-funded by the EPSRC with a focus on visual psychophysics and combining transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) with neuroimaging techniques, in particular MEG and fNIRS, to study the physiological basis of neuromodulation in sensory processing. Sophie is also investigating the use of finite-element-models of transcranial electrical stimulation for designing and evaluating brain stimulation experiments.