Session 1

Precision Symptom Targeting: Advancing Movement Disorder Treatment With Deep Brain Stimulation

Thursday, May 1st from 9:20a - 10:50a

Session Chair

Leonardo Brito de Almeida, MD, MS

Associate Professor and Movement Disorders Division Director, Department of Neurology, University of Minnesota

"Deep brain stimulation local evoked potentials to enable asleep intraoperative targeting and optimize post-operative programming"

Enrico Opri, PhD

Assistant Professor, Biomedical Engineering and Neurology, University of Michigan

Dr. Enrico Opri is an Assistant Professor at University of Michigan within the Department of Biomedical Engineering and Neurology. He is a core faculty within the Biointerfaces Institute and he is affiliated with the Michigan Neuroscience Institute (MNI). His lab focuses on understanding how stimulation can alter neural circuits affected in neurological disorders, with the overall goal of identifying neurological markers that can be leveraged to improve and enhance current state-of-the-art therapies within movement disorders. He earned his PhD in Biomedical Engineering at University of Florida. Later he completed his postdoctoral training at Emory University.

"Evoked resonant neural activity to guide deep brain stimulation for movement disorders"

Kara Johnson, PhD

Postdoctoral Associate, Departments of Neurology and Neurosurgery, University of Florida

Dr. Kara A. Johnson is a senior postdoctoral associate at the University of Florida in the Norman Fixel Institute for Neurological Diseases and the Departments of Neurology and Neurosurgery. She earned her BS and PhD in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Utah with support from the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP). Her current research aims to understand the therapeutic mechanisms of deep brain stimulation (DBS) in movement disorders such as Parkinson’s disease (PD) using invasive neurophysiology, neuroimaging, and computational modeling. She also holds special interest in nonmotor symptoms and psychiatry, including Tourette syndrome and mood/anxiety disorders. Her ultimate goal is to develop multimodal, translational approaches to guide DBS and other neuromodulation therapies to improve treatments and quality of life for patients with neurological and psychiatric disorders.

"Towards personalized deep brain stimulation"

Nanditha Rajamani, PhD

Postdoctoral Researcher, Harvard Medical School

Nanditha Rajamani is a postdoctoral researcher at the Center of Brain Circuits and Therapeutics. Her work focuses on developing precise connectomic models of Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) to estimate clinical improvements in neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson's disease, OCD, and Depression. Currently, she aims to bridge the gap between such connectomic models across various targets and diseases by leveraging pathway activation algorithms to ultimately advance personalized targeting and programming strategies in neuromodulation.

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