2022 Conference

Keynote address

Dr. Etienne Labyt is a Senior Expert Engineer in MEG/EEG imaging. After 12 years at the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), he has now funded his startup Mag4Health (ww.mag4health.com) with two colleagues, Matthieu le Prado and Agustin Palacios Laloy. He is working on Helium 4 Optically Pumped Magnetometers (4He OPM)  for MagnetoEncephaloGraphy (MEG) imaging.  

Kim Butts Pauly's lab studies novel therapies of focused ultrasound, a versatile technology with many applications. The lab uses image guidance to better plan, monitor, and evaluate treatment efficacy as well as to understand basic science mechanisms. By leveraging their own lab's scientific and engineering expertise and working in collaboration with other labs, their goal is to improve these focused ultrasound therapies as they become more commonly used in the clinic.

I am a PhD student in the AI-enabled healthcare CDT at University College London, UK,  

Previously, I completed an MEng in Computer Science and an MRes in AI-Enabled healthcare systems at UCL. I am now pursuing my PhD supervised by Prof Bradley Treeby, Prof Ben Cox and Dr Antonio Stanziola in the Biomedical Ultrasound group. 

I am working on deep learning methods to convert MR images to CT images, with the goal of using them in transcranial ultrasound stimulation applications. Specifically, I am exploring how to generate personalised pseudo-CTs that can be used for ultrasound simulations. 

I am a Lecturer in the Department of Psychology at the University of Essex where I lead the SeLab. I completed my BSc in Psychology (First Class hons- top 4 students), and my PhD (Distinction Summa Cum Laude) in electrophysiology at the University Complutense (Madrid). During my doctoral training, I was awarded a highly competitive 4-year scholarship from the Spanish Research Council (<4% success rate), and 2 visiting fellowships: one to work at Humboldt University (Berlin) with Prof. Werner Sommer, and another fellowship to work with Prof. Bettina Forster and Dr. Beatriz Calvo-Merino at City University (London). In this time, I developed novel methods to examine sensory and motor brain responses occurring during emotional perception. 

In 2013, I moved to my first postdoctoral post with Prof. Manos Tsakiris at Royal Holloway University (London), where I continued developing advanced electrophysiological methods to accurately measure sensory brain responses. In 2015, I moved to the University of Oxford to work at Prof. Matthew Rushworth’ lab where I worked on my own personal research grant from the Bial Foundation investigating brain plasticity in the motor control network with combined advanced brain stimulation and electrophysiology (e.g. Sel et al, 2021, PNAS).

Pablo Maceira is a post-doctoral researcher in the lab of Prof. Friedhelm Hummel, Defitech Chair of Clinical Neuroengineering, at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) in Geneva and in Sion, Switzerland. His research focuses on the study of the neural mechanisms underlying motor skill acquisition, as well as on the potential of using non-invasive brain stimulation to restore and enhance these mechanisms. As an engineer, he leverages a variety of tools from data science and systems engineering to complement clinical knowledge from healthcare specialists, to improve learning and recovery in healthy older adults and stroke patients. 

Dr. Ruddy was awarded a first class honours BSc degree in Psychology from Queen’s University Belfast (QUB) in 2010, and in the same year was named by The Times Higher Education as UK graduate of the year in the category of Social Science and Humanities.

She then conducted a PhD under the supervision of Prof. Richard Carson using a range of neuroimaging techniques to investigate transfer of motor learning between the two brain hemispheres (also at QUB), graduating in 2014. Following this she worked for three years as a postdoctoral researcher in the Neural Control of Movement Lab at ETH Zürich in Switzerland.

In 2017 she was awarded a two year fellowship from the Irish Research Council, to develop a new form of brain-computer interface at Trinity College Dublin under the supervision of Prof. Robert Whelan.

In 2018 she was presented with the Early Career Investigator Award from Neuroscience Ireland.

In 2019 she secured €712,000 in funding from the Health Research Board to establish the Translational Brain Health Lab at Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience, and won the Early Career Award from the Neuropsychology division of the Psychological Society of Ireland.

She is now coordinating a clinical trial in collaboration with St. James Hospital and Tallaght Hospital in Dublin, testing the efficacy of using Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) neurofeedback to improve upper limb function in stroke survivors.

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Dr Kathy Ruddy was awarded the Brainbox Initiative Research Challenge in 2018, and will be joining us at the Brainbox Initiative Conference 2022 to provide insights into her ongoing research.

I am a PhD student in the NeMo and Surrey Sleep Research labs at the University of Surrey, supervised by Dr Ines Violante and Prof Derk-Jan Dijk.

My work explores the idea that the moment to moment fluctuations in brain activity may be leveraged to optimise neuromodulation. More specifically, I am employing closed-loop auditory stimulation – sounds administered according to the dynamics of the EEG in real time – to modulate and investigate specific oscillations and their role in various behaviours such as sleep and memory.

Previously, I completed an integrated master’s degree in Chemistry at the University of Reading, worked for 2 years as a synthetic organic chemist in drug discovery, and completed a master’s degree in Psychology at the University of Surrey.

Dr Marco Davare is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Life Sciences and Medicine at King’s College London. He is a qualified physiotherapist from Université catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain, Belgium), has an MSc in Biomedical Sciences and obtained a PhD in Neurosciences in 2008 (UCLouvain). Dr Davare then joined the UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology, University College London, as a Wellcome funded post-doctoral fellow under the supervision of Prof. Roger Lemon and Prof. John Rothwell. In 2012, he was awarded a BBSRC David Phillips Fellowship and built his first lab combining non-invasive brain stimulation and virtual reality environments for studying cortical mechanisms underpinning the sensorimotor control of skilled hand movements. In 2019, he also co-founded a Digital Health and Smart Technologies research centre, sourcing UKRI World Class Laboratories funds at Brunel University London, where he holds an Honorary Readership.

Dr Davare’s current research interests sit at the interface between movement neurophysiology and cognitive neuroscience. Specifically, he investigates visuo-tactile sensory integration parameters used for movement guidance, which in turn inform perception of the surrounding environment. The general scope of his work is to provide a better understanding of the cortical biomarkers underlying skilled sensorimotor control in health and disease, and integrate these biomarkers into smart technology-driven neurorehabilitation of patients suffering from sensorimotor disorders.

I am a DPhil student in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Oxford, supervised by Prof Jacinta O’Shea and Prof Michael Browning and funded by the MRC. The aim of my project is to develop new depression treatments using brain stimulation techniques. I combine transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), neuroimaging and computational modelling to investigate information processing in depression. Since depression is associated with a negative cognitive bias, I am trying to combine tDCS with reinforcement learning paradigms to increase attention towards positive information. In the second part of my project, I am investigating different cognitive phenotypes of depression.   

Prior to my DPhil I completed a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology and a Master’s degree in Social, Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience at Freie Universität Berlin.

Dr. Arulpragasam is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at Brown University. She received her B.S. in Neuroscience and B.A. in Linguistics from Duke University. Following graduation, she pursued research within the Division of Neurotherapeutics at the Massachusetts General Hospital on the use of deep brain stimulation as a treatment for major depressive disorder as well as on neuroimaging methods to measure neural correlates of a range of cognitive processes across psychopathology. Dr. Arulpragasam earned her PhD in Clinical Psychology at Emory University where she developed a neuroimaging paradigm to measure neural mechanisms underlying human cost/benefit decision-making. Through the combined use of functional neuroimaging, computational modeling, and transcranial magnetic stimulation, she identified precise computations that key regions perform during effort-based choices. Her postdoctoral research, under the mentorship of Dr. Noah Philip, focuses on the use and development of low intensity focused ultrasound in patients with depression and anxiety.

Dr. Tom Marshall is a post-doctoral researcher in Computational Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Oxford. Tom first held a TMS coil during a summer school while studying at the University of Amsterdam, and has been fascinated ever since with harnessing transcranial brain stimulation to alter brain activity and improve cognition and health.

Tom’s research combines brain stimulation with neuroimaging and computational modelling to study the neural mechanisms of attention, learning and decision-making. His work focuses on integrating different modalities; understanding how computations within brain regions arise from underlying neural dynamics, and how structural and functional mechanisms allow networks of brain regions to inter-operate. He has recently been awarded funding to develop ‘computational neurostimulation’ approaches for enhancing the efficacy and specificity of tDCS.

In 2019, Dr Roisin McMackin (Trinity College Dublin) was awarded the Brainbox Initiative's  Research Challenge Award for her fantastic proposed study investigating motor and cognitive cortical network dysfunction-based biomarkers of neurodegenerative diseases.

Roisin will be joining us at the Brainbox Initiative Conference 2022 to provide some exciting updates on the progress of her research and insights into the process of starting a project under the Brainbox Initiative Research Challenge.

Alisha N. Dua is a 5th-year MD-PhD candidate in the lab of Conor Liston at Weill Cornell Medicine. Alisha’s love of neuroscience previously brought her to London as a Fulbright Postgraduate Scholar when she completed her Masters of Research in Neuroscience at UCL. Alisha now studies the transcriptomic and network-mediators of the antidepressant effects of rTMS using machine learning and human neuroimaging data. Outside of the lab, she is a member of student leadership at Weill Cornell and a dedicated explorer of the NYC food scene. 

Naaz Desai (Kapadia) is currently a Post doctoral Fellow in the lab of Dr. Robert Chen at Krembil Research Institute- University Health Network, Toronto, Canada. Her current work focuses on combining the use of non- invasive brain stimulation techniques with existing rehabilitation technologies to improve patient outcomes. She recently graduated from the Rehabilitation Sciences Institute- University of Toronto. Her PhD work was supported by the Canadian Institutes for Health Research Doctoral Fellowship. 

She is an experienced clinician and researcher with over 20 years of clinical experience and over 10 years of research experience. She continues to practice clinically at the KITE-Rocket Family Clinic at University Health Network. Her research interests include the development and validation of neurorehabilitation therapies and outcome measures specifically targeting upper extremity recovery in individuals with acquired neurological conditions. Some of her past work includes the development of complex upper extremity functional stimulation protocols for retraining arm and hand function following stroke, spinal cord injury and traumatic brain injury. She has played a pivotal role in the commercialization of MyndMove FES stimulator which embeds these upper extremity protocols. She is an invited expert on the Spinal Cord Injury-High-Performance indicators Team that aims to develop structure, process and outcome indicators for each prioritized domain for individuals with Spinal cord injury at a national level.

Elena Beanato is a PhD student in Neuroscience at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. As part of the team of Professor Hummel, her work focuses on non-invasive deep brain stimulation combined with neuroimaging techniques in the context of motor learning and memory. Her main goal is the translation of these techniques into clinical applications.

I am a Professor of Biomedical Ultrasound in the Department of Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering at University College London (UCL). My research sits at the interface between physical acoustics, biomedical ultrasound, numerical methods, and high-performance computing. In particular, I am interested in developing fast and accurate models of how ultrasound waves travel through the human body. This involves studying many interesting acoustic phenomena from a physical perspective, and then devising novel ways in which these can be captured by a numerical model. Much of my work has been released as an open-source acoustics toolbox for MATLAB called k-Wave.

Professor Bradley Treeby will be speaking at the Brainbox Initiative Conference's Satellite Workshop on Saturday, September 24.