MEMBER

Sylvie Nozaradan, M.D. Ph.D., is Professor at the Institute of Neuroscience of UCLouvain (Belgium) since September 2018. The same year, she was awarded a Starting Grant from the European Research Council to develop her research on rhythm and the brain at UCLouvain. Previously, she received an ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award from the Australian Research Council to conduct her research for three years at the MARCS Institute, Western Sydney University (Australia). She has a double Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLouvain and Montreal University (Canada), for her work on the neural bases of rhythmic entrainment. She has a dual background: in music (master in piano, Conservatoire Royal de Bruxelles, Belgium) and science (medical doctor, UCLouvain).

Sylvie’s research group, the Rhythm & Brains Lab, aims to better understand the brain processes responsible for the ability of humans to perceive and move to musical rhythm. To this aim, they use functional neuroimaging techniques (scalp and intracerebral EEG, functional MRI) and non-invasive neuromodulation techniques (transcranial magnetic stimulation or TMS, transcutaneous direct current stimulation) combined with novel techniques to selectively tag the brain activity in response to rhythmic sensory inputs such as music, rhythmic visual objects, rhythmic tactile input or rhythmic movement of the body. The goal of this research is to understand how the human brain is able to make sense of and produce musical rhythm, how this ability is influenced by a number of factors such as cultural background, inter-individual differences, musical training, recent context, attention or body movement. Moreover, we investigate how our ability for musical rhythm is affected by lesions in particular areas of the brain, and in turn how musical rhythm can help brain-damaged patients to recover from auditory or motor deficits.