My profile
I am a post-doc researcher in Neurosciences interested in the mechanisms of control and regulation underlying sensorimotor activities. Sensorimotor activities include all motor activities that lead to develop an expertise in terms of movement control or dexterity, and that depend upon sensory feedback for refinement, e.g. playing a music instrument. I am also more generally interested in action control and sensory feedback. My main research topics include: timing; spatial control of movement trajectories; action planning and the executive functions; touch; active touch; texture exploration; object manipulation; prosthetics; experience-driven plasticity.
I am doctor in Psychology since December 2013, with a specialization in neuropsychology. During my Phd, I studied action planning ; i.e. how actions are prepared and planned for execution under spatial and temporal constraints, under motor control (study of the timing and spatial errors) and neuropsychological perspectives. More precisely, I developed the well-known finger-tapping paradigm into a spatial-tapping task; and I studied the relationship between spatial-tapping and the executive functions of action planning using a battery of neuropsychological tasks. My supervisors were Pr. Yvonne Delevoye-Turrell (SCAlab, Lille, France) & Pr. Alan Wing (SyMon Lab, Birmingham, UK).
Between March 2014 to March 2019, I worked as a post-doc researcher at the department of Physiology of the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, under the supervision of Pr. Johan Wessberg. There, I studied the neurophysiology of touch. I was trained to the techniques of microneurography & microstimulation, which consist in recording/stimulating single afferent nerve activity in awake humans. During this post-doc, I worked for two EU projects: Prototouch & DeTOP. In Prototouch, I was Marie-Curie fellow (Experienced Researcher). My main task was to record and evaluate the peripheral nerve responses elicited by innovative tactile stimulators, such as the StimTac, which is a friction modulator. In a close future, these innovative tactile technologies will be implemented in tactile displays such as in tablets to improve the user's tactile experience. My main task in DeTOP was to use the technique of microstimulation in the general population to study the range of tactile perceptions that one can elicit using electrical stimulation of peripheral nerves. The final objective was to transfer the knowledge acquired to select relevant patterns of stimulation enabling to restore sensory feedback in amputee individuals equipped with sensorized prosthetics. I also developed another line of research conducting both behavioural and microneurographic studies focused on the topic of active touch. In those studies, natural sliding movements are used to explore various textures and surfaces, with or without neural recordings. This dataset can be used as a reference to better understand how our peripheral neurons respond in ecological situations.
Since May 2019, I am a post-doc researcher at the Centre de Recherche en Psychologie et Neurosciences (CRPN), group of microneurographers Somatosense, Marseille, France, under the supervision of Dr. Rochelle Ackerley (DR CNRS). I am working for the ArtTouch project, that is centered on the neurophysiology of touch in all its complexity. Here, we will study how different types of afferent fibers interact to enable meaningful tactile perceptions, e.g. how A-beta and C-T fibers stimulated by a gentle caress interact to give rise to pleasant sensations. Our topics also include water perception (mechanical touch and thermal components), active touch (mechanical touch and proprioception), and social touch (mechanical and emotional touch).