People

• Neuropsychological assessment of memory, attention and executive functions in the context of brain injury and healthy ageing.
• Cognitive rehabilitation interventions (eg Goal Management Training).
• Functional imaging of the effects of cognitive rehabilitation interventions.
• Treatment of mood disorders after stroke (music based interventions and positive psychotherapy).

As part of the UCIS Lab, I look at the combination of Neuroscience and Information Retrieval. My focus is on Information Overload.

My research is concerned with the processes of semantic cognition – i.e., the ways in which we (a) maintain a store of conceptual knowledge about objects, words and people and (b) use executive control processes to access this information in a flexible, task-appropriate manner. I explore this using a variety of techniques, including:

• Case-series neuropsychological investigations, primarily of patients with semantic dementia and semantic deficits following stroke
• Computational linguistic analyses (e.g., latent semantic analysis)
• Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation in healthy subjects
• Functional neuroimaging studies
• Connectionist computational models

Neural stem cell therapy for stroke: A rodent based project to identify potential MRI indices of functional recovery

Stroke is leading cause of severe disability in adults. The clot-buster, Alteplase is the only licensed drug available to treat acute stroke patients however, this is only available to a small percentage of total sufferers and must be administered within the first 4.5 hours after the onset of the stoke. Although substantial research has been carried out to develop new therapies for acute brain damage and chronic disability, the translation from bench-to-bedside has proved to be a significant hurdle.

Many groups have focused on administering stem cells of patient-own or external origin to enhance brain repair. The use of  the conditionally immortalized human neural stem cell line CTX0E03 to treat sub-acute/chronic stroke is soon to enter Phase II clinical trials.

My project is an adjunct to existing pre-clinical work; aiming to understand  how the cells improve recovery using clinically applicable MRI methodologies.

I have successfully developed functional tests suitable of detecting long term functional changes post stroke. With the support of Dr Jozien Goense, we have set up resting-state fMRI in the anaesthetised rodent. With this technique at our disposal, we hope to identify indices of functional improvement in resting-state sensorimotor networks and values derived from the diffusion tensor, which may correlated with improved sensorimotor function.

This is a SPIRIT funded studentship; the stem cell technology, surgical equipment, training and a contribution of supervision for this project are supplied by industrial partner, ReNeuron ltd. (Guildford, UK).

I am a registered STEM ambassador and have participated in outreach events with EuroStemCell.

Magdalena is a neuropsychologist and cognitive neuroscientist in Psychology at the University of Stirling. Beside Magnetic Resonance, research questions in her lab are answered using brain stimulation (TMS and tDCS) and (mobile) EEG as well as behavioural techniques such as eye-movements and movement kinematics and behavioural lesion studies in neurological patients. Basic science in her lab centres primarily around perception and action ranging from visuomotor function to social neuroscience. Her applied work is on motor rehabilitation and more recently on brain injury diagnostics too. She works collaboratively towards mobile neuroimaging solutions to investigate more real-world cognition. Magdalena is interested in brain plasticity both with regards to cognitive architecture and changes of function in stroke, traumatic brain injury, and abnormal development such as autism. Due to the increasing societal challenge of dementia she wants to contribute to mobilising the neuroscience community to answer perhaps by clarifying the role of plasticity in delaying dementia onset. Magdalena is very interested in collaborating in particular on understanding the normal brain through the study of people with brain damage and work towards evidence-based changes in practice. For details on research activity see www.StirlingBrains.org ; www.MobileCognition.org ; https://sites.google.com/site/magdalenaietswaart/home