Oswal Group
Our aim is to provide a detailed understanding of how brain network activity at various timescales contributes to movement and cognitive function, both in health and in neurological diseases. Neurological symptoms are not static, but change over minutes, hours, or days, meaning that an understanding of the origins of their dynamics is necessary for the development of improved therapies. We aim to: (1) relate nerve cell activity within particular brain networks to specific symptoms and (2) modulate this activity in order to improve clinical outcomes.
We adopt a multidisciplinary approach to understand how communication within brain networks contributes to both normal and pathological brain health. To this end, we study healthy individuals and patients with neurological conditions that affect movement and cognition e.g., Parkinson’s disease, and other neurological conditions such as dementia.
Some of the patients we study have undergone a surgical procedure known as Deep Brain Simulation (DBS), during which electrodes are inserted deep into the brain to allow for therapeutic electrical stimulation. By recording from DBS electrodes and from cortical brain areas non-invasively (using EEG or MEG) it is possible to study cortico-basal ganglia interactions and reveal their modulation by DBS. A key goal of our research is to carefully characterise the network modulatory effects of DBS, in the hope that these can be reproduced using novel minimally-invasive techniques.
A parallel strand of our research leverages imaging modalities with high spatial and temporal resolution to reveal network disturbances that underly impairments of memory and motivation in patients. The neuronal mechanisms underlying these symptoms are presently poorly understood, and there are significant opportunities for improving treatments.
- Oscillatory dynamics underlying motor, memory, and motivational impairments in neurological disease
- Predicting pathological signals for Deep Brain Stimulation
- Refining Deep Brain Stimulation for symptom control
- Neuroimaging & neurophysiological techniques (MEG, EEG, MRI)
- Invasive recordings (local field potentials & ECOG)
- Deep Brain Stimulation
- Computational modelling, Machine Learning & signal processing
Mary Muers (far right) moderates an interactive session about training and career development opportunities.
Recent Publications
Recent Preprints
Like other Groups at the BNDU, we are committed to best practice in open research. We have created and curated a range of primary data, metadata and related resources that can be readily downloaded by external users from the BNDU's data sharing platform, Cambium.