Short trains of transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation increase online corticospinal excitability and pupil size in humans

Ronan Denyer recently completed his PhD in Neuroscience at The University of British Columbia, Canada, under the supervision of Dr. Lara Boyd. His PhD thesis research combined brain stimulation, neuroimaging, and behavioural tasks to investigate the role of the dorsal premotor cortex in the control of simple and complex bimanual movements. As a postdoctoral fellow in the CoActions Lab, Ronan will use transcranial magnetic stimulation in tandem with vagus nerve stimulation to better understand the role of the locus coeruleus in movement preparation.

Shiyong Su completed her Master and Ph.D. (2015-2022) in Biomechanical Engineering at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China (with Prof. Xiangyang Zhu), where she focused on the stimulation encoding and sensory evaluation for the sensory reconstruction of bidirectional neural prostheses, including the integrated implementation of closed-loop sensory feedback combining myoelectrical control and electrotactile stimulation, and the functional mechanism underlying sensory feedback based on electrophysiological evaluation. She was a visiting doctoral fellow at the Institute of Neuroscience in UCLouvain (with Prof. André Mouraux) where she developed a project exploring how tactile feedback could be integrated with auditory and visual feedback in next-generation multisensory human-computer interfaces. After this period, she began as a post-doctoral researcher at the CoActions Lab, where she was investigating the effect of taVNS on decision-making.

Mantosh did his Masters in Neuroscience from the National Brain Research Centre, India. He further did a Research Assistantship with Prof. Nivethida Thirugnanasambandam, where he worked on a project analyzing structural and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging data from a large set of Parkinson’s Disease patients curated from the Parkinson’s Progression Markers Initiative database in the hopes of identifying biomarkers that could be used in the early stages of the disease to predict the onset of dyskinesias later in life. He then joined the CoActions lab in December 2022 for his PhD.

Research broadly explores a range of questions pertaining to the cognitive neuroscience of human behavior. Conduct experiments to explore the interaction between cognition and action in neurologically healthy and impaired individuals. Use a variety of techniques to characterize the functional role of different parts of the motor pathways, including transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), functional and structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and electroencephalography (EEG). Recent research investigates the role of the locus coeruleus in various aspects of action control, including reaching movement control, decision making, and behavioral vigor, using transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation (tVNS) to causally probe this neuromodulatory system. More →