people

I am a Consultant Clinical Academic and lead the CMD Lab.

My PhD at University College London focused on the role of the cerebellum in dystonia, using a combination of neurophysiology, robotics and psychophysics to study the problem from different angles. This work was supported by a Guarantors of Brain Clinical Research Fellowship through the Association of British Neurologists scheme and I was supervised by Mark Edwards and John Rothwell.

I then took up a Chadburn Clinical Lectureship at St George’s University of London, where I helped establish the Motor Control and Movement Disorders Group and completed my neurology training. As a Principal Investigator, I continued research into mechanisms underlying dystonia and functional neurological disorders, supported by additional funding awards from the Royal Society, SGUL and the Rosetree Trust.

In 2023, I joined the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit as a Senior Clinical Research Fellow mentored by Maneesh Sahani. This transition was supported by an Early Career Award from the Wellcome Trust and enabled me to establish the CMD Lab. I am also an Honorary Consultant Neurologist at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery where I see patients with hyperkinetic movement disorders in a weekly clinic alongside Tom Warner.

Iván Varela is a Research Assistant interested in computational modelling to understand brain function and its disruption in disease. He completed a BSc at the University of Miami and an MSc in Neuroimaging at King’s College London.

He is currently based at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit and the Department of Clinical Movement Neurosciences at UCL, where he plays a central role in the lab’s core project to build a large-scale, multimodal dataset in patients with movement disorders. His work spans data collection, processing, and analysis, supporting statistical characterisation of features across multiple levels of abstraction.

Kate Sampson is a Research Physiotherapist and Highly Specialised Physiotherapist in neurosciences, focusing on innovative neurorehabilitation approaches for hyperkinetic movement disorders. She has worked across the patient pathway from hospital to home, gaining broad experience with patients presenting a wide range of neurological conditions in diverse settings.

Her research addresses a key gap in the neurorehabilitation literature by focusing on hyperkinetic movement disorders, an underrepresented area. She is currently investigating the experiences of patients with dystonia accessing physiotherapy in the UK and developing novel approaches to dystonia rehabilitation.

Mireia Coll is a Research Physiotherapist with an interest in neurological recovery. She completed a BSc in Physiotherapy in Barcelona and an MSc in Nervous System Sciences at Rovira i Virgili University, Spain. She has extensive experience working with neurological patient populations across a range of clinical settings, and subsequently moved into clinical research with neurotechnology companies developing virtual reality and brain–computer interface approaches to stroke rehabilitation.

In 2022, she joined UCL, contributing to the ArmLab led by Nick Ward. She is now part of the CMD Lab, where her work focuses on studying hyperkinetic motor manifestations using multimodal datasets.

Isobel Platt is a Clinical Research Fellow in movement disorders. She completed her undergraduate medical training at UCL and has returned to undertake a PhD on DYT-TOR1A Dystonia.

Her project aims to develop quantitative phenotyping of patients with DYT-TOR1A dystonia and those with non-genetic dystonia through high-density electromyography (HDEMG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG). The work is a collaboration between the Department of Clinical Neurosciences and the Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging.

Marta Sartori is a PhD student at the Gatsby. She brings her theoretical and computational background to the study of movement disorders, developing foundational models of motor control.

Defne Tepret is an MSc Clinical Neuroscience student at University College London. She completed her BSc in Neuroscience at Queen Mary University of London, where her research examined interneuron injury in an aged rodent model of traumatic brain injury.

At the CMD Lab, her project focuses on quantitative phenotyping of patients with DYT-TOR1A dystonia using kinematic and electromyographic (EMG) measures.