New face at MIB: Francisco Contreras-Ruston

Francisco Contreras-Ruston has joined Center for Music in the Brain as a postdoctoral researcher, under the supervision of Associate Professor Boris Kleber. Funded by the Lundbeck Foundation, his project “Mapping Auditory-Motor Speech Control Across Dopaminergic States in Parkinson's Disease” asks why voice and speech symptoms so often persist in Parkinson's disease, even when dopaminergic medication improves limb movement. To address this, he uses EEG and MRI to study how the brain monitors and controls a person's own voice, and how this auditory-motor loop changes across the patient's dopaminergic state.

Before coming to Aarhus, Francisco completed a joint PhD between the University of Barcelona and Maastricht University, with a dissertation on self-voice awareness and sensory feedback in Parkinson's disease. A speech-language pathologist from Chile specialising in voice, he is especially interested in how we recognise and regulate our own voice, and what happens to these mechanisms when the motor systems of the brain are affected by disease.