Rachel Spooner, PhD in Neuroscience
I am a cognitive neuroscientist and postdoctoral researcher who specializes in using magnetoencephalographic (MEG) imaging in studies involving healthy adults, as well as neurologic patients. I received my graduate training from one of the most productive MEG laboratories in the United States (> 25 peer-reviewed publications per year) at the University of Nebraska Medical Center under supervision of Prof. Tony Wilson, PhD. Additionally, I am completing my postdoctoral training from renowned MEG signal processing and movement disorder experts, Prof. Esther Florin, PhD and Prof. Alfons Schnitzler, MD at Heinrich-Heine University in Düsseldorf, Germany. Thus far, my scientific career has broadly spanned the investigation of four major research themes including the neurophysiological substrates of normative behavior, the age- and disease-related trajectories of neural-behavioral dysfunction (e.g., HIV-infection, Parkinson's disease), the neurobiological contributors to pathological sensorimotor decline (e.g., mitochondrial redox environment), and the neural mechanisms underlying invasive and non-invasive neurostimulation approaches used to augment behavior. To this end, I have utilized numerous methodologies including neuroimaging of spatiotemporally-precise neural oscillations using emerging MEG approaches, the development of novel sensorimotor and cognitive MEG experimental paradigms, the analysis of quantitative biological assays, advanced inferential statistics, and the administration of neurostimulation protocols (e.g., transcranial electrical stimulation, deep brain stimulation). Importantly, these efforts have been supported by numerous competitive external fellowships and research supplements and as a result, I have been fortunate to publish 26 high impact articles in broad interest and field-specific journals such as PNAS, EBioMedicine, NeuroImage, and Cerebral Cortex, with 11 of these as first author and 1 as senior author. My current research aims to identify quantitative neurophysiological and kinematic symptom spectrums in patients with Parkinson's disease both on and off therapeutic deep brain stimulation to elucidate the pathological neural-behavioral relationships underlying motor dysfunction.
Financial relationships
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Date added:04/14/2022