PhD Successfully Defended

We celebrate together our colleague Dr. Janne Heijs, who has successfully defended her PhD thesis ‘‘Towards a better understanding of cueing for Parkinson’s disease: Validation of experimental approaches, and neural insights from healthy individuals.’’  This is an important milestone and a fantastic achievement for our colleague and our PVS project team.

Janne’s doctoral research focused on advancing experimental approaches to better understand the neural and behavioral mechanisms underlying freezing of gait (FoG) and external cueing in Parkinson’s disease. A major challenge in this field is the difficulty of reliably inducing FoG and studying its neural basis under controlled laboratory conditions. Her thesis addressed these methodological barriers, by validating innovative methods and technologies with applications beyond Parkinson’s disease. In particular, the auditory Stroop task and a multipin dry EEG system evaluated during the project show potential for studying other neurological and movement disorders, including stroke. The work further highlights the need to systematically compare cue characteristics, as different neural mechanisms may contribute to variations in cue effectiveness across individuals and sensory modalities.

Looking ahead, emerging mobile neuroimaging technologies and increasingly realistic virtual environments offer promising opportunities to improve the ecological validity needed for gait research. These advances may help further uncover the mechanisms underlying FOG and cueing, and hopefully, support the development of more personalized cueing strategies to enhance mobility and quality of life for people with Parkinson’s disease.

We warmly congratulate Dr. Janne Heijs on this well-deserved success and look forward to our continued collaboration!