Professor Chris Miall BSc, DIC, PhD, ARCS

 

Professor of Motor Neuroscience

Chris Miall

Contact details

Telephone +44 (0)121 41 42867

Email r.c.miall@bham.ac.uk

School of Psychology

About

Professor Miall has been studying sensory motor control for about 30 years, from his PhD in locusts, to crayfish, primates and for most of the last decade, working on human motor control. He is particularly interested in the role of the cerebellum.

Qualifications

  • B.Sc. (Imperial, London, 1977)
  • Ph.D. (Imperial, London, 1980)

Biography

Professor Miall has been studying sensory motor control for about 30 years. His PhD was a mix of behavioural studies and developmental endocrinology in locusts, with John Moorhouse at Imperial College London. He started off his post-doctoral research in the electrophysiology of crayfish, working with Jim Larimer in Austin, Texas. He was then trained in signal analysis by Dick Kitney at Imperial College and worked on primate neurophysiology with John Stein at Oxford. In 1986 he studied flight control in locusts and dabbled in neural networks while at King’s College Research Centre in Cambridge. And in 1989 he returned to Oxford, where he stayed untill 2004 when he moved to the Behavioural Brain Sciences Centre at the University of Birmingham.

Teaching

Professor Miall teaches a second year course on the Biological Basis of Movement, and also teaches on the MRes in Brain Imaging and Cognitive Neuroscience.

Postgraduate supervision

Professor Miall is interested in supervising graduate students in topics related to sensory-motor control, motor learning and the function of the cerebellum. Students should be knowledgeable about neuroscience, and interested in quantitative analysis of behaviour.

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Research

Professor Miall’s research focuses on motor learning and motor coordination, usually in visually guided actions (such as tracking moving objects, or using a computer mouse). Much of his recent work has been directed towards questions of predictive knowledge and predictive control, and how these issues reflect on the use of 'internal models' in the nervous system. His team are using tests of human motor psychophysics, with functional MRI and TMS as brain mapping techniques.

Other activities

Professor Miall is on the board of the Society for the Neural Control of Movement, is a member of the Society for Research on the Cerebellum, of the British Neuroscience Association and of the Society for Neuroscience.

Publications

Albert N, Roberston E, Miall RC (2009) The resting human brain and motor learning. Current Biology, 19: 1-5.

Galea J, Albert N & Miall R.C. (2009) Theta-burst TMS to the DLPFC facilitates the consolidation of procedural skills J Cogn. Neurosci. (in press)

Lewis PA, Miall R.C. (2009) The precision of temporal judgement - milliseconds, many minutes, and beyond. Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc. B. (in press).

Nazarpour K, Praamstra P, Miall R.C. & Sanei S. (2009) Brain Computer Interfacing via Steady-State Movement Related Potentials. IEEE Trans. Biomed. Eng. (in press)

Miall R.C., Gowen E. & Tchalenko J. (2008) Drawing cartoon faces – a functional imaging study of the cognitive neuroscience of drawing. Cortex 45: 394-406.

Ronsse R., Miall R.C., Swinnen S. (2009) Multisensory integration in dynamical behaviours: maximum likelihood estimation across bimanual skill learning. J. Neurosci., (in press)

Tchalenko J. & Miall R.C. (2008) Eye-hand strategies in copying complex lines. Cortex 45: 368-376.

Balslev D & Miall R.C. (2008) Eye position representation in human anterior parietal cortex. J Neurosci. 28: 8968-8972.

Gowen.E, Stanley.J & Miall.R.C. (2008) Movement interference in autism spectrum disorder. Neuropsychologia, 46: 1060-1068.

Haith,A., Jackson, C.P.T., Miall R.C., Vijayakumar S. (2008) A unified model of perceptual shifts in sensorimotor adaptation. N.I.P.S. (in press)

Jackson, C.P.T. & Miall R.C. (2008) Contralateral manual compensation for velocity-dependent force perturbations. Exp Brain Res. 184: 261-267.

Miall R.C., King,D. (2008) State estimation in the human lateral cerebellum. Cerebellum 7: 572-576.

Expertise

How the human brain controls movement; how we learn and adapt our movements; visual guided movement; use of brain imaging, brain stimulation and movement recording methods, in normal people and in patients with movement disorders

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