Young Investigator Winner 2026: Dr Caroline Nettekoven

Dr Caroline Nettekoven is a Wellcome Research Fellow at the University of Oxford whose research aims to make non-invasive brain stimulation more precise and personalised.

She specialises in mapping and targeting functional regions of the individual human brain, with a particular focus on the cerebellum, an important but historically underexplored structure in neuromodulation.

Dr Nettekoven began her research career with a BSc from Heidelberg University in 2016, followed by a DPhil at the University of Oxford, completed in 2021. During her doctoral research, she investigated cerebellar transcranial direct current stimulation and found no measurable effects on visuomotor adaptation. Rather than viewing these null findings as a setback, she used them to identify a fundamental challenge in the field: conventional stimulation approaches may lack the precision needed to account for substantial individual differences in cerebellar organisation.

This insight has driven her subsequent work. Dr Nettekoven led the development of the first individualisable functional atlas of the human cerebellum, providing a framework for precisely localising functional regions for personalised stimulation. She has further shown that task-based fMRI can more accurately predict individual functional organisation than resting-state approaches, challenging a common assumption in precision stimulation research.

Building on these advances, and supported by a Wellcome Trust Early Career Award and a Young Investigator Award from the Raynor Cerebellum Project, Dr Nettekoven has developed an individualised, MRI-guided transcranial ultrasound stimulation approach capable of targeting deep cerebellar structures.

Early results from an ongoing double-blind study demonstrate a selective improvement in motor sequence performance following personalised cerebellar stimulation. Together, her work has progressed from identifying the limitations of conventional cerebellar stimulation to developing and testing the tools needed for more precise, reproducible and individualised neuromodulation.

We're thrilled to welcome Dr Nettekoven at this year's Brainbox Initiative Conference and learn more about her research! 

Learn more and register today: Brainbox Initiative Conference 2026

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The Brainbox Initiative’s Young Investigator Award was founded in 2017 to help stimulate, promote, and reward the groundbreaking research that is being carried out every day by early-career neuroscientists using pioneering non-invasive brain stimulation and imaging techniques. Every year we receive a fantastic amount of high-quality research from neuroscientists at universities around the world, and we are extremely pleased to present Dr Caroline Nettekoven with the 2026 award.