Radboud University Medical Centre, The Netherlands

Vivian Weerdesteyn has a background in Physiotherapy and Human Movement Science. She currently holds a professorship in Motor Control and Rehabilitation at the Radboud University Medical Centre. The mission of her group is to help people with neurological conditions (in particular, stroke, Parkinson’s disease and rare hereditary movement disorders) to maintain or regain safe and independent mobility. In two state-of-the-art movement laboratories, sophisticated methods (EMG, mobile EEG, 3D movement analysis) are used to study the neural mechanisms for defective balance and gait control, funded for instance by a prestigious personal grant (Vidi grant, 2017) from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research. Recent work from the group involving high-density EEG recordings has  made major contributions to our understanding of how the cortex is involved in controlling balance. Such mechanistic insights into (impaired) balance and gait control are taken forward for designing and evaluating novel interventions to ameliorate these problems. Vivian Weerdesteyn is the past President and chair of the Nominations Committee of the International Society for Posture and Gait Research (ISPGR). She serves on the editorial boards of Gait & Posture, Experimental Brain Research, and on the Managing board of the Dutch Innovative Device Initiative (IMDI) Caretech.