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Dr. Joana Pereira is exploring cortical footprints of DBS in neuropsychiatric disorders

BrainLinks-BrainTools warmly welcomes a new member: Joana Pereira. She is a postdoctoral researcher at the Stereotactic and Functional Neurosurgery Department at the University of Freiburg – Medical Center and a guest researcher at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour in the Radboud University (Neurotechnology Lab). Currently she is establishing her own group at IMBIT.

She is a biomedical engineer with expertise in brain-computer interfaces. During her doctoral studies in Graz, her research focus was on decoding goal-directed movement intentions from non-invasive brain signals, particularly using low-frequency electroencephalography (EEG) features, to later enable neuroprosthesis and/or robotic arm control for people with spinal cord injury. During her first postdoctoral years in Freiburg, she was introduced to deep brain stimulation and the incredible insights one can gain when simultaneously combining brain stimulation techniques with recordings of the brain’s neural activity. Current studies include decoding of motor performance in patients receiving DBS for the treatment of Parkinson’s Disease through invasive (ECoG and LFP recordings) and non-invasive approaches, and across different therapeutic stages (acute and chronic recordings).

In 2023, she received funding from the German Science Foundation, the DFG, as part of the Walter Benjamin Programme, to lead her project on the cortical footprint of DBS in treatment-resistant neuropsychiatric disorders. In this project, she has the unique opportunity to simultaneously record and analyse multimodal brain signals (LFPs, ECoG, and EEG) to understand the mechanisms of action of deep brain stimulation in major depressive and obsessive-compulsive disorders. Promising first results of this project reveal, for the first time in humans and in vivo, that DBS of the superolateral medial forebrain bundle evokes prefrontal cortical responses in areas that are associated with the reward/maintenance networks. In the longer term, she aims to understand how this activity relates to structural connectivity measures, and critically, how the responses are modulated by the patients’ clinical response and behaviour.

More about Pereira’s work is available at: https://www.uniklinik-freiburg.de/stereotaxy/research-groups/lab-of-se.html