Application Deadline 19 May 2023

Bursary of a minimum of £17,668 per annum, including a full tuition fee waiver for three years.

Project title: Low-cost, accessible neurostimulation, experiments and simulations

Supervisors: Dr Nada Yousif, Professor Volker Steuber

Originality: The proposed project would for the first time combine experimental cerebellar stimulation and computational modelling, to show the feasibility of low-cost, accessible non-invasive neurostimulation for treating movement disorders.

Significance: The cerebellum is a critical structure for movement. We have previously shown that it is central in controlling pathological activity in epilepsy (Kros et al., Annals of Neurology 2015) and essential tremor (Yousif et al., PloS Comput Biol, 2017). Deep brain stimulation (DBS) has been used for decades to treat tremor (Benabid et al, 1998) and more recently epilepsy (Zangiabadi et al., Frontiers Neurology, 2019). However, DBS is a highly invasive surgical technique targeting the thalamus, a structure inaccessible by non-invasive neurostimulation.

Rigour: The project would involve, 1) a detailed biophysical computational model of the cerebellum, based on our previous work, but extended to involve connected structures such as the thalamus; 2) experiments with human participants involving non-invasive electrical stimulation of the cerebellum during normal movement tasks to inform, validate and test the model. Together, this will lead to theoretically based, novel stimulation paradigms for a closed-loop system.