International Journal of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation
Open Access

Carl PT Jackson

Biography

My undergraduate degree was in physics at the University of Nottingham, from which I graduated in 2003. During this time I spent one year on exchange at the University of Toronto.

For my PhD I stayed in Nottingham although I switched disciplines and studied experimental psychology. Specifically, I worked on the statistical processing of visuomotor distributions and brain imaging of the learning of predictable and random force sequences. Along the way I was involved in the development of a novel device for providing forces to the human finger inside the MRI scanner. I was supervised by Professor Stephen Jackson in the School of Psychology and Professor Peter Morris in the Sir Peter Mansfield Magnetic Resonance Centre.

In 2006 I started postdoctoral work with Professor Chris Miall at the University of Birmingham. I worked mainly on behavioural studies using the vBOT robotic manipulandum to investigate state-dependent reaching movements. I successfully defended my PhD in February 2008 and graduated in July 2008.

In October 2009 I moved to Kingston, Ontario, Canada to work with Professor Stephen Scott at Queen's University. My work here consists of further behavioural and clinical studies, including electromyography recordings, alongside building neuronal network models of human arm control. Most recently I have been awarded a two-year NeuroDevNet postdoctoral fellowship to extend my clinical work to populations of children with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder.

I moved to Toronto in September 2013, and I'm currently living the freelance life downtown!

Research Interest

During my nine years as a PhD student and postdoctoral fellow, I engaged in a wide variety of research into human motor control.Much of my motor control research was on behavioural experiments in humans. I was primarily interested in reaching movements; it is a complex and difficult task to activate all the muscles in the human arm in just the right order to attain a goal, and yet it is something that we do so naturally that we do not even think about it. Goal-directed reaches are a huge part of human interactions with the world, and how we learn to both control our actions and predict their sensory consequences fascinates me.