Computational Movement Disorders Lab
Our mission is to better understand human movement disorders so that our research creates new treatment options for patients. Using motion capture and wireless neurophysiology we study human movement disorders within naturalistic settings. We apply motor control theory and computational modelling to characterise the behavioural statistics of clinical phenomenology. In many disorders, unless we can reliably quantify and understand behaviour, circuit-level mechanism will remain elusive. Outputs from our research directly inform neuromodulation and neurorehabilitation strategies for patients.
We are an interdisciplinary group as many fundamental research questions in movement disorders are best approached with insights from diverse fields. We are based at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit a research center dedicated to theoretical and computational neuroscience and collect patient data in purpose built labs at the Department of Motor Neuroscience and Movement Disorders.
news
| Jun 23, 2025 | We’ve been awarded a National Brain Appeal Innovation Fund grant to develop an intelligent Movement Assessment system (iMOVA)! |
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| Jun 22, 2025 | Great range of content at European Academy of Neurology annual congress in Helsinki. Iván will be presenting ‘Bridging Pixel Precision and Clinical Intuition: Quantifying ‘Movement Disorders Phenomenology’ with 2D Pose Estimation’. Kate’s eposter also avail ‘EPV-934 Getting the right care: Physiotherapy for patients with dystonia in the United Kingdom’! |
| Jun 20, 2025 | Congratulations to Issi and Zoe for their commission within the UCL Trellis Arbor Art Programme. |
| May 21, 2025 | Thank you to UCL Research Capital Investment Fund (RCIF) for awarding funding to the lab to create a motion capture system for clinical spaces … |
| May 14, 2025 | Phenomenal range of science across species at the inaugural UCL Dystonia Symposium! Anna part of panel discussions on how to best advance dystonia research and will give a talk on work in task-specific dystonia … |
| Apr 23, 2025 | Congratulations to Kate on the birth of her son Aleksander! Kate will be on maternity leave for one year. |
| Apr 01, 2025 | Welcome to Mireia Coll who joins the team as a research physiotherapist! |
| Jan 13, 2025 | Our review of metacognition and functional neurological disorder. Tries to provide an analytical checkpoint after the first five years of experimental work and flag the many unanswered questions that future work will help us address! |
| Jan 08, 2025 | A hot topic article for Movement Disorders showcasing scientific work by Smoulder et al. revealing a neural basis for choking under pressure. Informative for neurological disorders such as task-specific dystonia. |
| Sep 24, 2024 | Anna will be speaking at the session ‘The neurology of visual recognition’ at the International Congress of Parkinson’s Disease and Movement Disorders in Philadelphia chaired by Steven Frucht and Marina Koning-Tijssen. |
| Jul 22, 2024 | Musicians with dystonia are less able to individuate single finger movements than healthy musicians. In a new paper in Nature Scientific Reports we discuss whether sensitive markers of dexterity could be biomarkers for different phases of the disorder. |
| Sep 08, 2023 | Symposium on the Neuroscience of Expert Performance at Royal College of Music co-organised with Maria Herrojo Ruiz and Katja Kornysheva! Thank you to the panel, RCM colleagues and multi-disciplinary audience. Made possible by outreach grants from the Guarantors of Brain and Goldsmiths University of London. |
| Sep 01, 2023 | New article with Mark Edwards debating significance of clinical phenotype and how circuit-level understanding is critical to optimise treatment strategies in patients: Between Nothing and Everything: Phenomenology in Movement Disorders |
| Jun 17, 2023 | A huge thank you to all authors in our book Basic and Translational Applications of the Network Theory in Dystonia just published with Springer. Co-edited with Asif Shaikh. It was fascinating to collate this range of experimental papers and reflections from an international panel of experts that lead research on this important topic! |
| May 20, 2023 | Dystonia Special Podcast! As part of the dystonia special series for the Movement Disorders Society podcast I discussed the neural underpinnings of dystonia with Francesca Morgante! |
| Oct 10, 2022 | How is task-specific dystonia represented in the brain? A collaboration with Jörn Diedrichsen in which we explored a range of traditional spatial analysis and state-of-the art multivariate analyses to search for reliable neural correlates within sensorimotor cortex. Published in Brain. |
| Jun 19, 2022 | The similarity of eyeblink conditioning behaviour in dystonia and controls is against a global deficit in cerebellar learning. Published in Movement Disorders we discuss how these findings inform models of cerebellar involvement in the pathophysiology of dystonia. A research digest also available in Dystonia Matters written for Dystonia UK. |
| Apr 03, 2022 | A commissioned practice pointer on dystonia in the BMJ. The late Adam Kalinowski skillfully sculpted content. We hope it will increase awareness of dystonia and offer a clinical roadmap for patient management. |