Alumni of the Laboratory for Computational Motor Control

Sarah Criscimagna-Hemminger

Sarah Criscimagna-Hemminger, 2001 Strawberry picking, near Baltimore, 2002 Sarah Hemminger, 2005 Jun Izawa, Vincent Ethier, Courtney Haswell, and Sarah Hemminger. San Diego, 2007. Minnan Xu-Wilson, Robert Nickl, and Sarah Hemminger. Hawaii, 2009 April 2009, Hawaii Mollie Marko, Robert Nickl, Thomas Reppert, Ali Ahmadi-Pajouh, and Sarah Hemminger, 2010 Sarah Hemminger, Reza Shadmehr, Adrian Haith, August 2010 Jean Jacque Orban de Xivry, Pavan Vaswani, Mollie Marko, Michelle Herran, Sarah Pekny, and Sarah Hemminger. San Diego, 2010. San Diego, 2010 Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, 2010

Sarah joined the laboratory as an undergraduate student in 2001 while she was completing her BS in Biomedical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. As an undergraduate she performed the first motor adaptation experiment on a split-brain patient, demonstrating that inter-manual transfer occurred despite disconnection of the two hemispheres. She joined the lab as a BME graduate student in 2005. Sarah was awarded a pre-doctoral fellowship (NRSA) from the NIH in 2008. She was named a Siebel Foundation Scholar in Bioengineering in 2009.  She discovered a latent form of motor adaptation in patients with severe cerebellar damage.  She also discovered that sudden performance errors in a well-learned task did not produce unlearning, but installed a new, fragile memory that with passage of time became strengthened. She completed her PhD in 01/2010 with the thesis Linking error, passage of time, the cerebellum and the motor cortex to the multiple timescales of motor memory. Sarah is the founder and CEO of Incentive Mentoring Program. The results of her work in our lab were published in the following papers: Cerebellar contributions to reach adaptation and learning sensory consequences of action. J Izawa, SE Criscimagna-Hemminger, and R Shadmehr (2012) Journal of Neuroscience 32:4230-4239. Abstract Protection and expression of human motor memories. SE Pekny, SE Criscimagna-Hemminger, and R Shadmehr (2011) Journal of Neuroscience 31: 13829-13839. Abstract Contributions of the motor cortex to adaptive control of reaching depend on the perturbation schedule.  JJ Orban de Xivry, SE Criscimagna-Hemminger, and R Shadmehr (2011) Cerebral Cortex 21:1475-1484. Abstract Size of error affects cerebellar contributions to motor learning. SE Criscimagna-Hemminger, AJ Bastian, and R Shadmehr (2010) Journal of Neurophysiology 103:2275-2284. Abstract Consolidation patterns of human motor memory. SE Criscimagna-Hemminger and R Shadmehr (2008) Journal of Neuroscience 28:9610-9618. Abstract  Dissociating timing and coordination as functions of the cerebellum. J Diedrichsen, SE Criscimagna-Hemminger, and R Shadmehr (2007)   Journal of Neuroscience, 27:6291-6301. Abstract Learning dynamics of reaching. R Shadmehr, O Donchin, EJ Hwang, SE Hemminger, and A Rao (2005) Motor Cortex in Voluntary Movements: A distributed system for distributed functions, A. Riehle and E. Vaadia (eds), CRC Press, pp. 297-328.  Abstract Learned dynamics of reaching movements generalize from dominant to non-dominant arm. SE Criscimagna-Hemminger, O Donchin, MS Gazzaniga, and R Shadmehr (2003) Journal of Neurophysiology 89:168-176.  Abstract