Liesjet van Dokkum

**Intérêt de Recherche** : Imagerie IRM, contrôle moteur, cinématique, plasticité cérébrale, neurorehabilitation **Compétences**: aisance rédactionnelle, communication écrite et orale, rédaction appel d’offre, modélisation du comportement (motrice, langage, psychiatrie), analyse en imagerie fonctionnelle par résonance magnétique (IRMf), gestion de projet. **Technique** : Pack office, recherche & gestion bibliographique (PubMed, Cochrane, EndNote, Zotero), Matlab, SPSS, (f)MRI (SPM, freesurfer, Rest-toolbox, CONN-toolbox, DTI) **Langues** : Néerlandais (maternelle), Anglais (courant & scientifique), Français (courant), Allemand (basique) **Function:** Principal Research Engineer at the "Institute d'Imagerie Fonction Humain (I2FH). gestions scientifique des projets IRMf + capture de mouvement en 3D. CHU Montpellier. **Formation**: Doctorat: "upper-limb rehabilitation post-stroke and cerebral plasticity (2010-2013). Montpellier University, Euromov. Research masters and bachelors: 1) Coordination dynamics, 2) Psychomotor therapy (2002-2009). VU University of Amsterdam **Publications:** 16 publications avec 335 citations (Web of Science Core collection) **Associations: ISRRA :** international stroke recovery and rehabilitation alliance**.** Founding member, expert team ‘kinematics’ **Centres d’ intérêts** **Sport** : natation en compétition (niveau national et internationale, médaillé, maîtres) **Créative** : écriture, photographie, musique (guitare pratique régulière de 7-18 ans) **Voyage :** Nouvelle-Zélande, Brésil, Surinam, Canada, Etats-Unis, Norvège, Roumanie **Principal Research Theme** **Background - “Why do people behave the way they do?” searching the answer to this question has been a general theme throughout my life. As a child, I wanted to understand why people were sad, angry, or happy. I wanted to understand why my friend could run very hard, and why I could run very long. I wanted to understand how ‘Evkeni Plushenko’ the famous Russian ice skater was able to perform his incredible jumps and how it could be that my grandfather was unable to move (he had ALS). Being a competition swimmer myself, it was only evident to pursuit my studies at the faculty of human movement science. There I became ‘hooked’ on the question of rehabilitation, touched by the extreme perseverance and positive attitude of the patients. Working for and with people facing such big health challenges, I became convinced of the importance of the individual approach, adapting rehabilitation to the patient’s specific characteristics to intervene at the right time with the right tool to optimize recovery and maximize patient’ daily life participation. In the following I will set forth two main domains of my work on brain plasticity: in case of abrupt injury (stroke) and during progressive injury (low grade gliomas).** **“Upper-limb rehabilitation post-stroke & plasticity”-** Every 4 minutes, someone in France has a stroke. The worldwide prevalence of stroke in 2010 was 33 million, with 16.9 million people having a first stroke (WHO 2010). About two-thirds of stroke survivors face long-lasting upper-limb impairments making stroke a major public health challenge. Rehabilitation is essential in guiding and favouring motor recovery. Over recent years, many large and costly clinical trials with broad eligibility and pragmatic designs generally remained inconclusive. Neuroscience-based identification of efficacious rehabilitation protocols demands a stepwise approach that identifies patients’ profiles. To identify subgroups, we need to improve our understanding about the mechanisms that drive motor recovery. Previous work allowed us to identify three interacting factors: The movement, the brain and the patient. In order to create a complete patient profile, we need to know how post-stroke movements are performed. Next, as stroke rehabilitation targets changes at the brain level, we need to know whether changes in brain activity are beneficial or not. Also, we need to know whether these changes reflect the optimal solution with regard to physical/anatomical limitations. And finally, we need to know the patient’s level of engagement. Thus, rather than focussing on the brain or on behaviour in an isolated manner, I approach post-stroke motor recovery multimodally, simultaneously focussing on: motor recovery – brain plasticity – individual features. The objective is to model patients specific motor recovery profiles by: 1/ analysing movement quality and daily arm-use by means of fine-grained kinematic analysis. 2/ exploring brain activity patterns in relation to the quality of motor control, by means of fMRI/fNIRS/EEG. 3/ identifying how brain networks and microcirculatory characteristics impact brain plasticity, by means of structural imaging (diffusion tension imaging), arterial spin labelling and vasoreactivity analysis. 4/ including individual psychological factors as covariates, like engagement and perceived momentum (believing in recovery potential).