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

Professor Miall has been studying sensory motor control for about 35 years. His PhD was a mix of behavioural studies and developmental endocrinology in locusts, with John Moorhouse at Imperial College London and Bill Mordue (Aberdeen). He started off his post-doctoral research studying the electrophysiology of crayfish, working with Jim Larimer in Austin, Texas. He was then trained in signals analysis and computing by Dick Kitney at Imperial College and worked on primate neurophysiology with John Stein at Oxford. In 1986 he briefly reverted to using insect models, to study flight control in locusts, and also dabbled in neural networks, supported by a Senior Research Fellowship at King’s College Research Centre in Cambridge. And in 1989 he returned to Oxford, where he stayed until 2004 when he moved to the Behavioural Brain Sciences Centre in the School of Psychology at the University of Birmingham. In 2006 he took over as Head of Psychology, and in 2013 became the Director of Research for the College of Life and Environmental Sciences.

Professor Miall teaches a second year course on the Neural Control of Movement, and also teaches on the MSc in Brain Imaging and Cognitive Neuroscience, and the MSc in Computational Neuroscience and Cognitive Robotics.

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

Professor Miall’s research focuses on motor learning and motor coordination, usually in visually guided actions (such as tracking of 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. He is also interested in extending this work on predictive control into cognitive domains. His team are using tests of human motor psychophysics, with functional MRI and MRS to map brain function, and TMS and TDCS to perturb its operations. Recent work has explored the use of robotics for stroke rehabilitation and of virtual reality systems for movement assessment and retraining. Most recently, he has begun to explore the possibilities of using new MEG sensors (OPMs) to record evoked responses in the cerebellum, a territory only poorly detected by standard MEG methods.

He is currently funded by:

• Royal Society Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowship.

He is a member of the Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Cognitive Robotics (CNCR) and the Centre for Human Brain Health (CHBH). 

His research team website is: http://prism.bham.ac.uk

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

He has held Research Fellowships from the MRC, Wolfson College Oxford, Kings College Cambridge, the Wellcome Trust and the Royal Society-Leverhulme Trust. In 2011 he was elected a Fellow of the British Psychological Society.

He is currently serving on the MRC Neuroscience and Mental Health Board (NMHB).