Eleni Patelaki, PhD

I received my PhD in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Rochester. My doctoral research, which I conducted as a member of the Schindler Cognitive Neurophysiology Lab, focused on identifying biomarkers of cognitive load, aging, and Parkinson’s disease. Specifically, I employed a dual-task involving walking while engaging in a cognitively demanding activity, and I harnessed it as a ‘brain stress test’, namely as a means to tax the neural resources and thus reveal any incipient age-related or disease-related declines by amplifying them. My doctoral work identified brain processes that are more flexibly executed in exceptional ‘multitaskers’, processes that decline in aging and PD, and others that resist decline in a small group of potentially ‘super-aging’ older adults. Also, I characterized the neural mechanisms underlying cognitive and motor improvement in response to deep brain stimulation in Parkinson’s disease.

In the Wang Lab, I extend the expertise that I acquired during my PhD to unraveling how pathological cortical-subcortical communication during gait adaptation can contribute to freezing of gait (FoG) in Parkinson’s disease. My postdoctoral research aims to identify neural markers of impaired gait adaptation and FoG, in order to ultimately utilize them in developing adaptive deep brain stimulation therapies to treat FoG.