Professor Tamar Makin is a professor of cognitive neuroscience here at UCL, and acts as the group leader of the plasticity research group. She strives to understand the key influences affecting the reorganisation of the adult brain, primarily studying individuals who have suffered hand loss to do this. In particular, professor Makin and the plasticity lab focus on the habitual uses of prosthetic limbs to discover how such artificial body parts result in brain augmentation. At our event, professor Makin will be primarily discussing her recent paper ‘Robotic hand augmentation drives changes in neural body representation’, which is a fascinating research paper displaying her labs fantastic and groundbreaking research on brain reorganisation. With a primary goal to have a positive clinical impact on amputees and clinical populations alike, professor Makin’s research is making headway into understanding the re-networking of the brain.

Please join us in person at Medawar Building G02 Watson Lecture Theatre for a really exciting first journal club of the year! 

Link to primary paper: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scirobotics.abd7935