Miriam Altermatt
Curriculum Vitae
Miriam Altermatt (born in 1986 in Basel, Switzerland) got her master degree in Human Movement Sciences and Sport at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. Her research interest during her master’s was the effect of transcutaneous spinal direct current stimulation on spinal circuitries in paraplegic patients and healthy subjects. She then spent 18 months in the outpatient clinic of University Hospital Balgrist performing electrophysiological measurements and neurological monitoring during spine surgeries. For her PhD at ETH Zurich Dr. Altermatt investigated the neural mechanism controlling cooperative hand movements and in how far this mechanism is impaired after stroke. She developed a new device for training of cooperative upper limb movements which is currently being commercialized by an international neurorehabilitation technology company. Dr. Altermatt was awarded with the ETH Medal for Outstanding Doctoral Theses and the ZNZ Award for the Best PhD Thesis. She joined the Neural Control of Movement Lab at ETH Zurich in 2016 as a postdoctoral researcher.
Research Interests
Dr. Altermatt focuses her research on the motor control of upper limbs. During her PhD she demonstrated a task-specific neural coupling mechanism that controls cooperative hand movements such as opening a bottle or slicing bread. Despite the fact that these movements are common in our activities of daily living, there is not much known about the neural control of such tasks. Dr. Altermatt has been able to show how these movements differ from other bimanual tasks in their control and how this motor control is affected by stroke. She now investigates how this knowledge could be transferred into new rehabilitation approaches for stroke patients to optimize the functional outcome and thus enhance the quality of life of these patients.