Our ability to move is acquired during development and continuously expanded and flexibly adapted during our lifetime.
Yet, the details of how our brains endow us with malleable motor repertoires remain elusive. Lesion studies and observations in neurological patients identified key cortical and subcortical regions that are necessary for movement.
Further studies in animals revealed that these contributions can be surprisingly fluid: lesions to a specific brain region can have no effect when executing some learned skills, even if animals cannot learn those skills without it. In the lab, we combine behavioural experiments in humans and rodents with neural recordings, targeted manipulations, and theoretical and computational approaches to understand how evolving interactions among cortical, subcortical, and spinal regions allow us to learn and execute motor skills. We further aim to close the discovery-to-translation cycle by leveraging our findings to engineer neurotechnologies that restore movement to people with the neurological conditions we study. 

The lab still has a foot at Imperial College London, while we relocate to the Champalimaud Foundation.