Schizophrenia Personal Statement

STATEMENT OF RESEARCH INTEREST

I'm a physiotherapist with 5 years of experience in rehabilitation of neurological disorders mainly cerebral palsy, cerebrovascular stroke and spinal cord injury. Although, the rehabilitation process takes a lot of time and money, the recovery is usually limited.
Moreover, the impacts of these disorders on patients and their family can be devastating. These factors were motivating me to search for new methods in management of these disorders.
I found that integration between rehabilitation and neuroscience is the corner stone to develop these new effective strategies based on physiological basis and plasticity and to share critical questions unanswered in the translation from basic science to human
application.
So, I began to foster my neuroscience knowledge through coursera and edx platforms. I accomplished about 8 courses related to brain, imaging technologies and computational neuroscience. These courses opened new windows for me to develop new ideas to help my patients beside the previous knowledge I gained from undergraduate and postgraduate studies of neuroscience, neurosurgery, neurology and radiology in which I achieved excellent grades.

After finishing my first research project of master thesis, I became able to formulate questions and follow scientific method of thinking to answer these questions. One of these questions is related to low frequency repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) which has promising results in management of adults with Alzheimer, Parkinsonism, depression, aphasia and cerebrovascular stroke with. The question is '' will low frequency rTMS improve walking parameters in cerebral palsy children with spastic hemiplegia?''. We will apply low frequency rTMS on non- affected hemisphere trying to release the affected hemisphere from inhibition and so improving the function of affected side and walking parameters.
If there will be promising results, we may use it in other deficits such as aphasia and spasticity.
I am interested in pursuing the master degree and PhD in neuroscience in charite university berlin which has a unique medical neuroscience program under supervision of highly qualified professors with principle of conducting interdisciplinary, curiosity-driven research. I am excited to learn more about recent brain excitements as connectomics, brainbow and optogenetics. Moreover, brain machine interfaces that make me motivated to introduce researches in animals with spinal cord injury with the idea of connecting primary motor cortex that control lower limb movement to spinal cord below level of injury (bypassing site of lesion) and so affected animals can control their walking through mind as occurred in people who controlled a robotic arm through their mind by connecting the motor area of the brain to robotic arm through artificial neural network. After earning my master degree and PhD, I would like to either continue in a high level research position or work in academia as a professor. I
would love to advise students and teach courses related to neuroscience and how to translate its findings into meaningful methods used in rehabilitation of different neurological disorders.