À propos
Phone: 33 (0)4 91 32 42 54
MB started her research in behavioral sciences, investigating how human gait (as all the sensori-motor automatisms -respiration, mastication, etc) can be modulated intentionally. This allows adaptation of these vital functions to the subject’s will, given the environmental constraints and the dynamical properties of the effector system. She got her PhD in 1991 in the laboratory “Cognition and Movement” (head: J. Pailhous) and got a permanent researcher position at CNRS in 1994.
Then, she developed an expertise in non-invasive techniques allowing the exploration of brain activation (fMRI, EEG, TMS) combined with behavioural data, in healthy human. 1998 to 2004, she led the team “Cerebral substrates of voluntary movement” in the laboratory “Movement and Perception (head: J. Pailhous). 2004 to 2011, she was the head of a team “Intention and action control” at the “Institut de Neurosciences Cognitives de la Méditerranée” (head: D. Boussaoud).
Since 2005, she is the scientific leader of an original platform (open to the community) allowing cortical focal stimulation (using MRI-guided Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation – TMS) combined with simultaneous recording of brain activation (using EEG) in humans. This neuronavigated TMS offers the possibility to induce a well-localized central perturbation of brain dynamics in healthy human subjects, and to on-line measure its direct effects on cortical activation. Moreover, TMS can be triggered depending on the immediate dynamic state of the brain, based on online processing the EEG. From the response of the brain to this stimulation, one can discover many properties of brain activation and try to interfere with them in return. For 2012, she joined the “Institut de Neurosciences des Systèmes, and she developed several fruitful collaborations with combined neuronavigated TMS and EEG with researchers inside and outside the laboratory on motor control, resting states, language, consciousness of our own body parts.