Team members (in alphabetical order) - 17 (06/2013)
Dr. Jan Babic | Jozef Stefan Inst. & University of Ljubljana | Ljubljana | SI |
Dr. Gunnar Blohm | Queens University | Kingston | CA |
Dr. Frédéric Crevecoeur | Queens University | Kingston | CA |
Dr. Ola Eiken | Royal Institute of Technology | Stockholm | SE |
Prof. Joachim Hermsdörfer | Technische Universität München | München | DE |
Prof. Amir Karniel | Ben-Gurion University of the Negev | Beer-Sheva | IL |
Prof. Thomas Lang | University of California, San Francisco | San Francisco | US |
Prof. Philippe Lefèvre | Université catholique de Louvain | Louvain-la-Neuve | BE |
Dr. Joe McIntyre | Université Paris Descartes | Paris | FR |
Dr. Makii Muthalib | Université de Montpellier 1 | Montpellier | FR |
Prof. Harris Papaxanthis | Université de Bourgogne | Dijon | FR |
Prof. Thierry Pozzo | Université de Bourgogne | Dijon | FR |
Dr. Jon Scott | QinetiQ | Farnborough | UK |
Dr. Jack Van Loon | VU Amsterdam & ESA/ESTEC | Amsterdam | NL |
Prof. Jean-Louis Thonnard | Université catholique de Louvain | Louvain-la-Neuve | BE |
Dr. Olivier White | Université de Bourgogne | Dijon | FR |
Prof. Alan M Wing | University of Birmingham | Birmingham | UK |
Principal Investigator
Dr. Olivier White - Université de Bourgogne, FRANCE
Olivier White (Belgium, born 1977) obtained his master degree in Computer Engineering in 2000. Between 2000 and 2002, he worked in the Rehabilitation Unit (medicine faculty, Université catholique de Louvain, BE) as a software and hardware engineer to create an experimental platform for parabolic flight experiments. Between 2002 and 2007, he completed a PhD in systems and control at the Center for Systems Engineering and Applied Mechanics (UCL). He was an active member of a Topical Team funded by ESA and he contributed to the writing of an ILSRA proposal (Dexterous is now scheduled to fly). His main interests were focused on the role of gravity in the control of dexterous manipulation. Between 2007 and 2009, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Bangor University (UK) and investigated motor control in redundant systems (advisor: Jörn Diedrichsen’s). Then he worked during 1.5 years as a Science Officer at the European Science Foundation (ESF) to support peer review activities and participate to the elaboration of THESEUS. He is now associate professor in Computational Neuroscience at Université de Bourgogne (Dijon, FR). His current research addresses computational motor control, object manipulation, redundant systems, role of noise in planning and execution, adaptation to force field and altered gravity. He is also responsible for the setting up of a new fMRI platform in Dijon. Olivier is member of the ELGRA association.
http://olivierwhite.weebly.com/
http://olivierwhite.weebly.com/
Co-investigators
Dr. Gunnar Blohm - Queens University, CANADA
Gunnar Blohm (DE, 1976) attended the European School of Luxembourg before entering a double-diploma program between University of Stuttgart (DE) and the Ecole Centrale Paris. After graduating in Physics and General Engineering, he did a PhD in Applied Mathematics/Neuroscience at the Universite catholique de Louvain (BE). During his PhD, he worked on models and behavioral experimentation investigating how the two main voluntary eye movement systems (saccades and pursuit) interact. He then extended his expertise on eye movement toward eye-hand coordination during a post-doctoral fellowship (Marie Curie Outgoing International Fellowship, EU) at York University (Toronto, CA). There, and during a second postdoctoral fellowship back in Belgium, he investigated mathematically and experimentally how sensory signals are transformed into geometrically accurate motor commands towards static and moving targets. Since 2008, he is an Assistant Professor in Computational Neuroscience at Queen’s University (Kingston, CA). His lab works at uncovering fundamental principles underlying brain function by means of a multi-disciplinary approach bridging computational modeling, behavioral experiments, clinical investigations and neuroimaging. His main research interests involve sensory-motor transformations, multi-sensory integration, eye-head-hand coordination and 3D vision. He has published numerous influential papers introducing conceptually novel ideas that have had a broad impact within the field of sensory-motor neuroscience. He is also the founder and main organizer of the annual summer school in computational sensory-motor neuroscience (CoSMo).
http://www.compneurosci.com/
http://www.compneurosci.com/
Dr. Jan Babic - Jozef Stefan Institute & University of Ljubljana, SLOVENIA
Jan Babic is a Research Fellow at Jozef Stefan Institute, Slovenia and an Assistant Professor at Faculty of Electrical Engineering, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. He received his PhD from Faculty of Electrical Engineering, University in Ljubljana examining the role of biarticular muscles in human locomotion. He received the JSPS Fellowship and was a visiting researcher at ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Japan during the years 2006/2007. His current research is particularly concerned with the understanding how human brain controls movement of arms and legs. A main focus of his research is to understand how the central nervous system process sensory information and transfer them to motor commands. He is especially interested in robustness and adaptations of the movements to the changing environment. He is developing a model of full-body motor learning that will help to elucidate the underlying neural mechanisms by which the brain iteratively modifies muscle activations during learning so that appropriate forces and viscoelastic impedance are created to ensure the stability. As a principle investigator, Jan Babič is currently participating in a EU FP7 project dealing with full-body compliant dynamical contacts in cognitive humanoids where he and his team are trying to understand and model human whole-body behaviours in physical interaction.
http://www.ijs.si/~jbabic/
http://www.ijs.si/~jbabic/
Dr. Frédéric Crevecoeur - Queens University, CANADA
rédéric Crevecoeur was born in Belgium in 1982. After his studies with orientation in mathematics and Latin, he entered the Louvain School of Engineering (EPL, BE) in 2000 and obtained his master degree in Applied Mathematics in 2005. Then, he entered the graduate school at EPL to investigate the effect of changes in gravity on sensorimotor coordination in collaboration with the Institute of Neuroscience of the Université catholique de Louvain (IoNS, BE). During his PhD, he had the opportunity to participate in 6 ESA parabolic flight campaigns as experimenter responsible for experimental design and data collection in flight. His research interests focus on object manipulation, motor control of the upper limb as well as advanced analysis of physiological rhythmic patterns such as gait. He is now a post-doctoral fellow in the Centre for Neuroscience Studies (Queen’s University, Kingston, CA) where he investigates the neural processes engaged in feedback control. His post-doctoral research is conducted under the supervision of Prof. S. H. Scott and is funded by Fellowship Award of the Canadian Institute of Health Research (CIHR).
Dr. Ola Eiken - Royal Institute of Technology, SWEDEN
Ola Eiken, MD, PhD, is the head of the Dept of Environmental Physioloy and of the Swedish Aerospace Physiology Centre, both within the Royal Institute of Technology, KTH, in Stockholm. His research concerns effects of environmental factors, viz: acceleration, pressure and temperature, on physiological responses in humans. During the last 10 years the research has mainly focused on cardiovascular, respiratory and vestibular functions as influenced by increased gravitointertial loading and by simulated microgravity.
Prof. Joachim Hermsdörfer - Technische Universität München, GERMANY
Joachim Hermsdörfer is Full Professor at the Department of Sports and Health Science at the Technische Universität München (TUM). He finished his study of engineering at TUM in 1985 and received his PhD at the Medical Faculty of the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich 1993 where he also received the habilitation degree in 2004. From 1990 he worked at the “Clinical Neuropsychology Research Group” in the “Hospital München-Bogenhausen” between and chaired the research group “Sensorimotor disturbances” until he obtain the Chair of Human Movement Science at TUM in 2010. His main interest is sensorimotor-control in healthy individuals and in patients with neurological diseases. He is studying a variety of motor skills ranging from elementary acts such as reaching and grasping to complex tool use actions. He uses behavioral as well as neuroimaging methods to investigate motor learning, high performance in sports, effects of perturbations in healthy subjects as well as consequences of brain damage. He and his group have studied fine motor control during parabolic flights.
http://www.professoren.tum.de/hermsdoerfer-joachim/
http://www.professoren.tum.de/hermsdoerfer-joachim/
Prof. Amir Karniel - Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, ISRAËL
Amir Karniel received a B.Sc. degree (Cum Laude) in 1993, a M.Sc. degree in 1996, and a Ph.D. degree in 2000, all in Electrical Engineering from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel. He received the E. I. Jury award for excellent students in the area of systems theory, and the Wolf Scholarship award for excellent research students. He had been a post doctoral fellow at the department of physiology, Northwestern University Medical School and the Robotics Lab of the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. He is currently an associate professor since 2003, he is within the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev where he serves as the head of the Computational Motor Control Laboratory and the organizer of the annual International Computational Motor Control Workshop. In the last few years his studies are funded by awards from the Israel Science Foundation, The Binational United-States Israel Science Foundation, and the US-AID Middle East Research Collaboration. Prof. Karniel is on the Editorial board of the IEEE Transactions on System Man and Cybernetics Part A, and the Frontiers in Neuroscience. His research interests include Human Machine interfaces, Haptics, Brain Theory, Neural Networks, Motor Control and Motor Learning.
http://www.bgu.ac.il/~akarniel/
http://www.bgu.ac.il/~akarniel/
Prof. Thomas Lang - University of California, San Francisco, USA
Thom’s primary research interests are the application of non-invasive imaging, in particular CT and PET, to study the morphological and functional alterations of the musculoskeletal system related to osteoporosis and sarcopenia. Over the last 15 years, his laboratory has developed widely used methods to analyze musculoskeletal images, and he has accumulated considerable experience in applying these methods to solve important biomedical problems, including the recent implementation of a method to study skeletal muscle protein synthesis in vivo with PET. In addition his laboratory has been carrying out exercise studies in the context of their National Space Biomedical Research Institute (NSBRI) grant, and his laboratory has built up expertise in exercise, muscle physiology and performance measurements. As part of their NSBRI project, his group has developed a compact multifunctional exercise platform that integrates lower-body strength training and cardiovascular exercise with a dynamic balance protocol that combines an unstable surface with six degrees of freedom with projection of changing visual scenes on a screen facing the subject. Recently, Thom as also been appointed as an expert in the Bones and Muscles group in THESEUS.
http://profiles.ucsf.edu/ProfileDetails.aspx?Person=5041955
http://profiles.ucsf.edu/ProfileDetails.aspx?Person=5041955
Prof. Philippe Lefèvre - Université catholique de Louvain, BELGIUM
Philippe Lefèvre is Full Professor of biomedical engineering at the Université catholique de Louvain (ICTEAM and Institute of Neuroscience). He is chair of the Biomedical Engineering program committee and Head of the Department of Applied Mathematics (School of Engineering). He obtained his electrical engineering degree and his PhD in applied sciences both from UCLouvain in 1988 and 1992 respectively. He has been investigating the neural control of movement for more than 20 years, by combining both experimental and modeling approaches. He has a broad experience on the interaction between vision and eye movements, including eye-head coordination. He also has expertise in the field of dexterous manipulation in micro-gravity.
http://perso.uclouvain.be/philippe.lefevre/
http://perso.uclouvain.be/philippe.lefevre/
Dr. Joe McIntyre - Université Paris Descartes, FRANCE
Joe has 20 years experience designing, implementing and exploiting the results from experiments on human physiology carried out in weightlessness. His experience includes the French-Russian missions to the Mir station (Andromède, Altair, Cassiopée, …), an experiment aboard the space shuttle during the STS-90 Neurolab mission and numerous ISS experiments, including COGNI, NeuroCog, NeuroSpat, Passages and Dexterous Manipulation (in progress). Dr. McIntyre has a proven track record of publication of these studies in high-ranking journals (J. Neuroscience, Nature Neuroscience).
Dr. Makii Muthalib - Université de Montpellier 1, FRANCE
Dr Muthalib completed a Bachelor of Applied Science degree in Human Movement Studies (1993-1996) and post-graduate Bachelor of Science (Honours Class 1) degree in Motor Control and Exercise Physiology (1997-1998) from The University of Queensland, Australia. Afterwards, he moved to London, UK where he setup a Health and Research consultancy business (1999-2005) and completed an Advanced Diploma in Computer Science (2000-2002). He returned to Australia again to complete a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Motor Control and Exercise Physiology (2006-2010) from Edith Cowan University, Australia. He was a Post-doctoral Research Fellow within the “Movement Neuroscience Program” at Queensland University of Technology, Australia (2010-2012) where he setup up a project to map brain activation to cognitive and motor performance in elderly and Parkinson's disease patients using a functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) neuroimaging approach. In order to develop his skills in neuroimaging and neurodulation techniques, he moved to Europe to work with a number of research laboratories in France (Montpellier-1 University; University of Bourgogne), Italy (University of L’Aquila; Politecnico of Milan), Germany (University of Kiel) and UK (University of Essex; University College London). He is currently a Post-doctoral Research Associate within the “Movement to Health” laboratory at Montpellier-1 University, France, where he is setting up a platform to combine non-invasive brain stimulation (tDCS) with fNIRS neuroimaging techniques in order to modulate brain activity and to causally probe cortical correlates of motor and cognitive functions.
Prof. Charalambos Papaxanthis - Université de Bourgogne, FRANCE
Prof. C Papaxanthis has defended his PhD thesis on the topic of ‘central integration of gravity force during arm movements’. Since 20 years, he has been involved in several experiments carried out during parabolic flights and during long spatial flight missions. He has supervised three PhD students and published more than 20 peer-review papers on the topic of motor control in a gravitoinertial environment. The main goal of his research is to understand in which level of the elaboration of the motor commands the brain encodes gravity force. He records and analyses kinematics, dynamics, electromyographic patterns of arm or whole body movements in normal gravity and microgravity conditions.
http://u1093.u-bourgogne.fr/fr/membres/60-charalambos-papaxanthis.html
http://u1093.u-bourgogne.fr/fr/membres/60-charalambos-papaxanthis.html
Prof. Thierry Pozzo - Université de Bourgogne, FRANCE
Thierry is head of the INSERM U1093 Laboratory and member of the Institut Universitaire de France. In his project, Thierry explores the organizational principles subserving the control of natural goal oriented action and how this control is implemented physiologically. The research is based on recent advances in neuroscience showing a strong coupling between action and perception through psychophysics, TMS and fMRI. I contributed to several studies conducted both in 1g and 0g demonstrating that gravity is not only a load acting locally and continuously on the body limbs, but is also used by higher levels of the nervous system as a dynamic orienting reference for the elaboration of motor commands.
http://u1093.u-bourgogne.fr/fr/membres/chercheurs-enseignants-chercheurs/54-thierry-pozzo.html
http://u1093.u-bourgogne.fr/fr/membres/chercheurs-enseignants-chercheurs/54-thierry-pozzo.html
Dr. Jonathan Scott - QinetiQ, UK
Jon was born in the UK in 1978. After gaining his A’ Levels in physics, mathematics and design, he attended The University of Bath and obtained a 1st Class BSc. in Sports and Exercise Science in 2002. In the following two years he worked briefly as a Teaching Fellow at The University of Bath and travelled in Australia and the South Pacific. He joined QinetiQ Ltd. in 2004 and worked on occupational physiology-based research, mainly for the UK Ministry of Defence, across a range of areas including epidemiology, metabolic physiology, and biomechanics. Between 2006 and 2010, whilst continuing to work at QinetiQ, he completed his PhD examining the biochemical response of bone to acute, weight-bearing exercise. Since 2010, he has been a Senior Scientist at QinetiQ’s UK human, long-arm centrifuge facility where he is responsible for delivering the sustained acceleration research programme. He also works as an advisor to QinetiQ’s Flight Physiological Centre in Linköping, Sweden, which includes QinetiQ’s second human-rated long-arm centrifuge facility. He is currently Development Manager for the UK Space Biomedicine Association, Acting Secretary to the UK Space Biomedicine Consortium, and a member of the UK Space Environments Working Group, responsible for the development of the business case for the UK’s participation in the European Space Agency’s ELIPS programme from 2012.
Prof. Jean-Louis Thonnard - Université catholique de Louvain, BELGIUM
Jean-Louis Thonnard is Full Professor at the Université catholique de Louvain (Institute of Neuroscience and Faculty of Motor Science). Since 2010, he is the head of the “System and Cognition” division in the Institute of Neuroscience. He has 75-refereed scientific papers on motor control and touch, including many studies in Parabolic Flights. His group participated to the NanoBioTact (FP6) and is currently involved in the NanoBioTouch (FP7) projects. He was the coordinator of a previous ESA Topical Team entitled “Eye-hand coordination: dexterous object manipulation in new gravity fields” (ESA publication SP-1281, pp148-163 (ISBN 92-9092-974-X)). He is also the Co-PI with J. McIntyre of the ISS experiment “GRIP”.
http://www.uclouvain.be/jean-louis.thonnard
http://www.uclouvain.be/jean-louis.thonnard
Dr. Jack Van Loon - VU Amsterdam & ESA/ESTEC, THE NETHERLANDS
Jack van Loon did his PhD in the field of mechano-sensitivity of bone cells and tissues at the Free University in Amsterdam. The thesis involved experiments performed both in US Space systems (Shuttle) and Russian systems (Bion). After his PhD he worked for Bradford Engineering, as responsible science persons in design and development of various microgravity research payloads for the Shuttle, Mir and the International Space Station like several gloveboxes (Material Science Glovebox, MSG, Life Sci. Glovebox, LSG. BioPack or the first designs of the Experiment Container for Biolab / EMCS). Van Loon moved in 1998 back to university to start the Dutch Experiment Support Center, DESC. DESC is a user support activity with mail goal to initiate and improve the scientific use of microgravity. Van Loon was the experiment coordinator for all but the physical science experiments flown on the Dutch-ESA Soyuz mission DELTA, April 2004. Van Loon was as co-I or PI involved in some 11 space flight experiments. Van Loon defined the requirements and initiated the establishment of a large centrifuge @ MMG Lab at ESA-ESTEC. The DESC activities have now merged with the MMG lab at ESA-ESTEC Noordwijk in order to generate synergy between e.g. the Large Diameter Centrifuge with the microgravity simulators like the Random Positioning Machines and clinostats.
Prof. Alan M. Wing - University of Birmingham, UK
Alan Wing studied Physics and Psychology as an undergraduate at Edinburgh University. After completing a PhD (with AB. Kristofferson) on timing of movement at McMaster University in Ontario, he continued this research as a postdoctoral research fellow (with S. Sternberg) at Bell Labs in New Jersey. He then joined Medical Research Council staff at the Cambridge Applied Psychology Unit (with AD. Baddeley) where he commenced studies of anticipatory control of posture in whole body balance and precision grip. Alan is presently Professor of Human Movement in the School of Psychology at The University of Birmingham where he leads the Sensory Motor Neuroscience group. Current funding includes MRC (Motor relearning in upper limb rehabilitation after stroke), BBSRC (Light touch for balance in the elderly), EPSRC (Multiperson synchronisation), Stroke Association (Retraining hemiparetic gait), EU FP7 (Nano-resolved multi-scale investigations of human tactile sensations and tissue engineered nanobiosensors, Apraxia rehabilitation, Human robot interaction).
http://www.symon.bham.ac.uk/people/research/winga.shtml
http://www.symon.bham.ac.uk/people/research/winga.shtml