bestmannlab

Sven Bestmann

Principal Investigator

Lisa Tedesco Triccas

Post-doc

Carys Evans

Post-doc

Catharina Zich

Post-doc / Research Fellow

Angelo Dawson

PhD student

Haya Akkad

PhD student

Jenny Lee

PhD student

William Kistler

PhD student

Lydia Mardell

PhD student

Sven hails from Dusseldorf, Germany, and conducted his PhD with Jens Frahm at the Max-Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, and John Rothwell at University College London. 

In the lab, we trie to understand how our brain controls movements, and the loss of this control in many neurological disorders of the brain, such as stroke, or Parkinson's Disease. In addition, we're still puzzled how different kinds of neurostimulation might work. 

Current post: Professor in Movement Neuroscience at the Department for Clinical and Movement Neuroscience, UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology, UCL.

Sven is a member of the Academia Europaea (AE)

Member of VfL Borussia Mönchengladbach.

My goal is to advance our understanding and promoting recovery of the upper limb. As a result, from my research experience at doctoral and postdoctoral level, I have acquired experience using behavioral and neurophysiological measures, including EEG and TMS, in the acute and chronic stage of stroke to specifically understand and predict sensory and motor recovery of the upper limb. Currently, I am involved in research exploring the behavioural and neurophysiological effect of high-dosage upper limb rehabilitation in people with stroke which is funded by the Stroke Association UK.

As part of my PhD and postdoctoral research I have explored interventions in pathology and ageing across two main topics: movement planning and execution, and mood and emotion perception.

Currently, I am investigating how cortical excitability changes in patients with upper limb impairments after stroke, and whether post-stroke brain plasticity can be enhanced using brain stimulation. Excitability changes and the effects of dose-controlled brain stimulation will be monitored early and late after stroke. Brain Research UK funds this project.

My main research aim is to advance our understanding of movement-related brain activity to facilitate human motor plasticity. To this end I use a suite of neuroimaging techniques. My key methods are EEG and MEG. During my PhD at the University of Oldenburg with Prof. Stefan Debener and Dr. Cornelia Kranczioch I used EEG-based neurofeedback and tDCS to modulate movement-related neural activity in younger and older healthy adults as well as in stroke survivors. During my postdoc with Prof. Charlotte Stagg I used Hidden Markov Modelling to characterise movement-related changes in cortical beta and gamma activity. 

I am a neurology registrar with a particular interest in stroke, the multidisciplinary approach to stroke rehabilitation and the application of principles of motor learning to the field of neurorehabilitation.  I am currently on a research break from his clinical neurology training programme to undertake a PhD. I'm interested in developing strategies that can be applied to the clinical setting in neurorehabilitation, in order to improve rehabilitative therapies for patients left with upper limb impairment following a stroke.  

I am interested in the physiology of rehabilitation after stroke, and how non-invasive brain stimulation techniques might be used as adjunct therapies. Specifically, little is known about how cortical oscillations underpin the changes seen through throughout learning and rehabilitation.  
A greater understanding of these changes could help develop more effective rehabilitation treatments for movement conditions such as stroke.

I have recently been awarded a Brain research UK fellowship to study (in the lab of Prof Jenny Crinion and the bestmannlab) how novel stimulation approaches can be used as adjunct therapies in stroke rehabilitation, in particular aphasia.
 

I graduated from the University of Nottingham in 2017 after studying Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience, and I am primarily interested in the processes underlying plasticity and motor control.

I am excited to start a PhD investigating the use of neurostimulation to enhance brain plasticity after stroke, and I hope to refine the protocol for brain stimulation techniques in the context of brain injury.

My project is funded through a Brain Research UK grant.

I'm a doctoral student in the UCL-NIMH Joint Doctoral Training Program in Neuroscience. My prior academic focuses have been on Psychology, Vision Science, and Computer Science. Before my start with UCL Neuroscience, I held positions as a Clinical Researcher with the Children's National Medical Center of Washington D.C. and as Lab Manager of the Immersive Virtual Environment Testing Area at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. My current research interests include the behavior and neurophysiology of motor learning in adults affected by chronic stroke syndrome. I seek to further characterize the components of upper-limb motor control recovery via the digital capture of fine-grained motor data and concurrent cortical activity. I also wish to explore in greater detail the acquisition and loss of maladaptive motor synergies as a signifier for motor rehabilitation in the post-stroke patient.

I am an MRC funded PhD student with Professor Nick Ward and Professor Sven Bestmann in the ARM lab. My research uses magnetoencephalography (MEG) and optically pumped magnetometers (OPM) to study the sensorimotor system. I am interested in how the signals recorded using these modalities, such as beta events, are generated within the brain and how they correlate to behaviour and plasticity. During my PhD I aim to discover how these signals are altered by drug-induced or disease brain states and what this may reveal about the underlying generators.