I completed four degrees and two postdoctoral fellowships in the USA, where I lived for 18.5 years. Since mid-December 2019, I have been a post-doctoral fellow in Neuroscience at the University of Nicosia Medical School, Cyprus. I hold a BS and MS in Kinesiology from the California State University Northridge, an MS in Biokinesiology from the University of Southern California, and a PhD in Health and Rehabilitation Sciences from the Medical University of South Carolina. Prior to my current post-doctoral position, I completed two two-year postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Delaware in Movement Science and Behavioral Neuroscience and New York University Grossman School of Medicine in TMS neurophysiology and post-stroke motor recovery, respectively. In addition to my academic and postdoctoral training, I also have a five-years of clinical training working with a diverse group of physically and mentally impaired clinical cohorts at the Center of Achievement through Adapted Physical Activity.
I am a motor neuroscientist, whose areas of research expertise and interests are the assessment and modulation of the motor descending drive (e.g., corticospinal tract - CST and corticoreticulospinal tract - CReST) to both upper and lower extremities, human locomotor control and learning, neuromechanical analysis of human movement, tracking of neural and motor recovery in clinical cohorts, and use of innovative computational approaches for the analysis of neurophysiological and neuromechanical data. The overarching aim of my research is to understand the plasticity of the descending motor pathways as it relates to sensorimotor function of walking, and how to harness that plasticity to promote walking recovery in clinical cohorts. My research vision is to fill the existing knowledge gap on the role of the motor descending drives during locomotor tasks, and to progress and develop mechanism-driven strategies to enhance locomotor performance and recovery after a neurological injury. My two lines of research involve the systematic examination of (1) how motor descending pathways contribute to sensorimotor control and learning of human walking in both neurologically intact and impaired adults, and (2) how behavioral (e.g., priming) and neurophysiological (e.g., non-invasive brain stimulation) approaches can modulate these descending pathways to improve the sensorimotor control and learning of walking after a neurological injury.