Elvira Pirondini, PhD Assistant Professor

Dr. Elvira Pirondini is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation and Bioengineering at the University of Pittsburgh. She obtained her M.Sc. degree in Bioengineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Lausanne, in 2012. During this time, she was awarded a fellowship from the Bertarelli Program in Translational Neuroscience and Neuroengineering to carry out her M.Sc. thesis at Harvard Medical School. She then earned her PhD in 2017 at the EPFL, Lausanne, where she was honored with the 2017 Outstanding PhD thesis Distinction in Electrical Engineering. Her thesis focused on robotic rehabilitation for stroke patients and brain imaging. During her PhD, she was the recipient of the Brown Institute for Brain Science Scholar fellowship to conduct part of her training in the department of Neuroscience at Brown University. Dr. Pirondini conducted her post-doctoral training at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, and at the Defitech Center for Interventional Neurotherapies of the CHUV hospital in Lausanne, Switzerland. She worked in parallel with human patients and animal models of stroke. Specifically, she worked on the development of a new model of subcortical stroke in primates to understand the neural mechanisms of recovery. She completed these explorations using electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in humans to study restoration mechanisms in stroke patients. She is now interested on developing new neuromodulation, and particularly deep brain stimulation, therapies to boost post-stroke recovery of motor and speech functions. In her talk she will present recent data showing the efficacy of stimulation of the motor thalamus to treat muscle weakness and control in post-stroke motor hemiparesis.