I am a medical honours student from the Netherlands, currently pursuing a DPhil in functional neurosurgery. As an honours programme medical student, I was selected for a highly competitive programme awarded to the top 25 applicants from a pool of 430 students across the Medical Sciences Division. This programme provided an additional 8-10 hours of research training per week.
My DPhil focuses on invasive neuromodulation for central neuropathic pain. This type of pain affects approximately 7-10% of the global population and has a tremendous impact on quality of life. A last-resort treatment for these patients is the use of invasive neuromodulation, such as Motor Cortex Stimulation and Deep Brain Stimulation. However, there remains a relative lack of mechanistic evidence, highly variable outcomes, and ongoing debate around optimal targeting and the use of stimulation parameters. In my studies, I will investigate the utilisation of connectivity-based neuromodulation to leverage the understanding of the interaction between neuromodulation and specific brain networks as a key mechanism in therapy response. This is a promising approach for overcoming the aforementioned challenges and enables a more precise targeting for better outcome prediction in these severely suffering patients.
