Sensory inputs are crucial to drive all the movements and postural adjustments that we make, whether this be for controlling the forces of the finger and thumb to hold a pen, standing and moving our arms to gesture while talking, or using our breathing muscles to speak or talk. Our laboratories have a long-standing interest in three fundamental aspects of sensory and motor control. First, how do our proprioceptive senses contribute to control movements and postural adjustments, second, how does the brain drive the motoneurones and muscles, particularly under circumstances when the muscle's performance changes, such as during fatigue, and third, how is human breathing controlled. Much of our work is at the interface between human neurophysiology and translation into understanding pathophysiology in a many clinical conditions, including stroke, spinal cord injury and respiratory disorders.
Simon Gandevia (MD PhD DSc FAA FRACP) trained initially with Ian McCloskey at the University of New South Wales and subsequently with David Burke at Prince Henry Hospital. He has broad research interests in human movement control and he has used a wide range of techniques to examine fundamental aspects of pathophysiology in human neuroscience and clinical medicine. His work often sits at the interface between medicine and basic human neurophysiology.
Professor Gandevia is one of the four Founding Scientists of the Prince of Wales Medical Research Institute (in 1992), which was later renamed NeuRA. He was also a founder of the 3T Clinical Research Imaging Centre and is a Clinical Neurophysiologist at the Prince of Wales Hospital. He has served on many editorial boards, including the Journal of Physiology (1993-2000; 2011-) and is currently a Senior Editor. He is currently Associate Editor for the Journal of Applied Physiology (since 2005). His clinical work includes patients with neuromuscular disorders and those with spinal cord injury.
His work is focussed on understanding the mechanisms that permit our repertoire of movement and the derangements which impair and limit movement: this repertoire ranges from the tiniest contraction of a hand muscle to the large inspiratory contractions required to sustain life. He has studied many patient groups including stroke, spinal cord injury, multiple sclerosis, asthma and obstructive sleep apnoea. His research is in three strands: (i) Proprioception – sensory inputs, motor commands and the body representation; (ii) Motor control and fatigue – from the motor cortex to the spinal cord and then the muscles; and (iii) Respiration – sensory and motor control of human breathing muscles in health and disease. He has published more than a hundred papers in the Journal of Physiology and two Physiological Reviews, one on supraspinal muscle fatigue and the other on proprioception.
From 2014 he will undertake an NHMRC program grant on Motor Impairment: basic and applied human neurophysiology with three colleagues at NeuRA.
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Click here to access Professor Simon Gandevia's research papers:
Control of the neural drive to human breathing musclesOur recent studies of the control of breathing muscles have shown a strong link between neural drive and mechanical action of the muscle. |
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Control of the neural drive to human breathing muscles in disorders such as obstructive sleep apnoeaObstructive sleep apnoea is a sleep disorder that affects more than 4% of the population and can lead to symptoms from daytime drowsiness to high blood pressure. |
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Studies of voluntary and involuntary control of human breathingBreathing is a complex motor task that needs to be coordinated at all times while we eat, speak, exercise and even during sleep. |
