Anna Hudsonprofile image
Dr

Anna Hudson


Current Appointments

Senior Research Fellow (Honorary)
Senior Research Fellow, Flinders University Adjunct Senior Lecturer, UNSW

Key Research Areas

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Anna Hudson completed her doctorate at NeuRA and UNSW in 2010. With the support of a NHMRC Fellowship and a Lung Foundation Australia/Boehringer Ingelheim COPD Research Fellowship, she completed postdoctoral studies at Hôpital Pitié-Salpêtrière, Paris and NeuRA. She is now based at the Flinders Health and Medical Research Institute Sleep Health (formerly the Adelaide Institute for Sleep Health) as co-lead of the Sleep Apnoea & Respiratory Physiology theme.

Anna’s research aims to understand respiratory physiology and pathophysiology, for example in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and healthy ageing. She uses a multi-faceted approach to investigate the neural control of breathing, e.g. electromyography to assess respiratory muscle activity, electroencephalography to assess brain activity and respiratory sensation and ultrasound for respiratory muscle mechanics.

Anna is most well-known for single motor unit recordings from human respiratory muscles that implicate the spinal cord as the site of integration of multiple descending neural drives to the motoneurones. She established the ‘principle of motor unit recruitment by neuromechanical matching’, which is applicable to all movements we make and is relevant to the broader field of motor control.


Publications

2022 Sep

Estimating inspiratory neural drive and the wakefulness drive to breathe

View full journal-article on https://doi.org/10.1007/s00421-022-04985-5

2022 Jul

Combined head accelerometry and EEG improves the detection of respiratory‐related cortical activity during inspiratory loading in healthy participants

View full journal-article on https://doi.org/10.14814/phy2.15383

2020 Jun

Increased diaphragm motor unit discharge frequencies during quiet breathing in people with chronic tetraplegia

View full journal-article on https://doi.org/10.1113/JP279220

2020, 01 May

Differential activation of the human costal and crural diaphragm during voluntary and involuntary breaths

View full journal-article on https://doi.org/10.1152/japplphysiol.00790.2019

2019 Oct

Discharge properties of human diaphragm motor units with ageing

View full journal-article on https://doi.org/10.1113/JP278498

2018 Dec

Inspiratory pre‐motor potentials during quiet breathing in ageing and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

View full journal-article on https://doi.org/10.1113/JP275764

2017 Dec

Task‐dependent output of human parasternal intercostal motor units across spinal levels

View full journal-article on https://doi.org/10.1113/JP274866

2015

Short-latency inhibitory reflex responses to inspiratory loading of the scalene muscles are impaired in spinal cord injury

2014

A novel ultrasound technique to measure genioglossus movement in vivo

2014

Does the Supplementary Motor Area Keep Patients with Ondine's Curse Syndrome Breathing While Awake?