INVITATION: The Institute Colloquium

OLE KIEHN
University of Copenhagen

Unraveling Circuits for Movement: Insights into gait motor control and implications for treatment for Parkinsonian gait disorders

Movement is the output of almost all brain functions. Among movement, locomotion is one of the most fundamental and universal to animals and humans. Locomotion is organised at many levels of the nervous system, with brainstem circuits acting as the gate between brain areas regulating innate, emotional, or motivational locomotion and the executing spinal motor circuits. To be executed, locomotion requires dynamic initiation and termination and appropriate directionally.

This lecture will focus on recent advances that have elucidated the functional organization of brainstem command circuits in mammals needed to perform these roles. The lecture will provide a new framework for how basal ganglia circuits are acting via these brainstem circuits to elicit self-paced locomotion and how brainstem motor circuits may be used to define brain-wide networks involved in high-level behaviors. I will also discuss how locomotor disturbances following e.g. basal ganglia disorders may be alleviated by targeted activation of brainstem and basal ganglia circuits.

• When: Monday, March 09, 11:30 a.m., CET (Austria)
• Where: ISTA, Raiffeisen Lecture Hall, Am Campus 1, 3400 Klosterneuburg

Information & contact: ONLINE