Sanne Kikkert
Curriculum Vitae
Sanne Kikkert received her Master’s degree in Cognitive Neurosciences (2013) at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. Subsequently, she received a prestigious scholarship from the UK Medical Research Council and Merton College to undertake a PhD degree at the University of Oxford under the supervision of Dr. Tamar Makin and Prof. Heidi Johansen-Berg. In her PhD research, Sanne investigated how the adult human brain changes following arm amputation with a special focus on phantom limb pain. In October 2017, she joined the Neural Control of Movement lab as a postdoctoral researcher. In 2018 she was awarded an ETH postdoctoral fellowship. She demonstrated that somatotopic representations are preserved, but deteriorate over time, in the brain of spinal cord injury patients. After obtaining an Ambizione career grant from the SNSF, Sanne has become a group leader at the Neural Control of Movement Lab in November 2022.
Research Interests
The ability to sense through touch is fundamental to actively interact with our environment. If we lose such sensory information through injury (e.g., spinal cord injury or limb loss), our brains are deprived of a major source of input, and we are required to use novel motor strategies. My team’s research aims at exploring how human brains are affected by such changes, what neural mechanisms may underlie resulting neural reorganisation, and how the human brain responds to sensory reinstatement through neuroprosthetics. A large body of our research focuses on exploring the brainstem as a key hub in brain plasticity, a structure that has been largely overlooked in human brain plasticity research. To do so, we merge cutting-edge functional and structural neuroimaging techniques. Our findings are expected to provide fundamental insights into human brain plasticity that may ultimately be used to guide desirable plasticity, discourage maladaptive plasticity, and better tailor treatments based on individual differences.
Publications
For a full list of publications please consult external pageGoogle Scholarcall_made.