Anna-Sophia is interested in understanding how the brain deals with brain damage such as a stroke, and how the brain initiates internal repair mechanisms that are the basis for the recovery of impaired motor or cognitive functions. “For example, if you think of a patient with a stroke, I would like to understand how the brain itself reacts to the injury from a network level all the way down to the activity of an individual surviving nerve cell”, illustrates Wahl.
“We still know very little of the complex spatial and temporal dynamics of the brain state after stroke and I believe that this has prevented us from developing successful treatment options which are able to causally interact with intrinsic repair mechanisms to restore lost or impaired function after stroke. In contrast to the optimized treatment strategies for the acute management after stroke, we still do not have any specific therapy that would help prevent long term effects of stroke or promote functional recovery of chronic impairments,” explains Wahl. Her group currently develops an experimental pipeline – using imaging technology, behavior, optogenetic and deep learning – to also study the efficiency of different pharmacological targets and neurorehabilitation paradigms to promote repair processes in the brain and thus restore lost or impaired functions.
By joining the SyNergy community as a SyNergy Professor, she will receive support to build up her lab at the Institute for Stroke and Dementia Research (ISD) and of course benefit from the SyNergy research community. “My students and I are looking forward to interact in the very vivid SyNergy community in seminars, retreats, and personal exchange. Furthermore, SyNergy is a fantastic platform for collaborations and provides excellent technology hubs, allowing us access to methods that we have not used before and that would not be possible standing alone. Vice versa, we hope to also contribute to the SyNergy community with our expertise in chronic-in-vivo imaging and analysis. I am already very grateful for interacting with different SyNergy members facilitating my start in Munich”, concludes Wahl.
