Grant: Canada Research Chairs

Humans can learn a nearly endless repertoire of movements. We learn motor skills such as walking, running, grabbing, kicking, throwing, and dancing. We may learn fine motor skills, such as those required to play an instrument or a sport that requires dexterous movements. Some of us may even need to learn to recover movement following an illness, accident, or disease. Dr. Emily Oby studies what happens in the brain during motor control and motor learning. Her research program lies at the intersection of neurophysiology, neural engineering, and machine learning. By combining these areas of expertise, Dr. Oby probes the details of how the brain controls and learns movement patterns. Furthermore, she develops brain-machine interfaces with the potential to restore movement to people with spinal cord injury or provide rehabilitation after stroke. During the term of her proposed Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Non-Human Primate Models of Health and Disease, Dr. Oby’s overarching objective is to use brain-machine interfaces and a neural population-level view of neural activity to investigate the neural mechanisms of motor learning. Brain-machine interfaces offer a simplified experimental paradigm for studying such learning. Using a brain-machine interface, an experimenter can record from all the neurons that directly drive behaviour, while defining how the neural activity relates to the behaviour. In learning experiments then, any changes in behaviour can be directly attributed to changes in neural activity. Uniquely, brain-machine interfaces allow the experimenter to design mappings that request neural activity with particular characteristics and then see whether the user can generate these characteristics. This is incredibly powerful because in such studies we can customize the mapping between neural activity and behaviour to the particular question we are asking. Understanding the neural mechanisms of learning might enable us to accelerate learning or rehabilitate neurological impairments. Dr. Oby aims to identify ways to use a brain-machine interface approach to facilitate both motor learning and stroke rehabilitation. Ultimately, the proposed research program has the potential to develop a brain-machine interface-based rehabilitative protocol to improve post-stroke behaviour or accelerate the reacquisition of motor behaviour.