M.D & Ph.D Candidate
Department of Kinesiology and Health Science
CIHR Group for Action and Perception
Ph.D
Although substantial progress
has
been made for understanding the neural control of movement in the past
30
years, the neural control of eye-hand coordination during
visually-guided
tasks, such reaching and grasping, remians poorly understood. By
investigating
the neural integration between visual perception and proprioception in
intact
subjects and patients, my research will advance in our understanding of
visually-guided
movment control. My research includes two components: first,
neuropsychological
behaviour experiments, in order to build basic information about
proprioception-guided
eye movement among intact subjects and patients; then neuroimaging
expeirments,
to further understand the machenisms which will be used in eye-hand
movements.
I use Eyecoil System to track eye movements, Optotrack System to trace
hand
movements, and fMRI to look at our brain activities in different
eye-hand
movement conditions. I hope by observing the proprioception-guided eye
movements,
we could find the mechanisms of proprioception in controling and
modulating
eye movements, then potentially allow clinicians to define more
precisely the requirement for the rehabilitantion of patients with
vision and movement
disorders.
Master of Medicine
Since I was
interested
in Ophthalmology in undergraduate study, I wanted to expand my research
and
clinical training in this field. This brought me to Dr. Wei Wang’s
laboratory
at Peking University Third Hospital, Beijing, China, where I had the
opportunity to increase my experience with patients who had vision or
neuro-visual disorders,
and improve my research skills on the fields of neuro-visual system and
related
radiology and neurophysiology. My independent research was at the level
of
molecular and cellular science - contribution of Muller cells in
retinal
development of RCS rats. In addtion, I cooperated other collegues on
the
research of retina transplantation, in order to look for the resolution
for
the patients with retina degeneration.
L. Ren & W. Wang. The transplantation of pure retinal photoreceptors. Ophthalmology (Tianjing), 8, 312-330.
L. Ren, A.Z. Khan & J.D. Crawford. Contribution of proprioceptive feedback from the arm to the spatial updating of remembered target positions for saccades.
Contribution of
visual
feedback, proprioception and efference copy in spatial updating of
target
postions. L. Ren & J.D. Crawford. The annual GAP
meeting
(CIHR Group in Action and Perception),
Contribution of proprioceptive feedback from the arm to the spatial updating of remembered target positions for saccades. L. Ren, A.Z. Khan & J.D. Crawford. Society of Neuroscience Abstracts 2004. Poster Presentation in October 2004.
●
Society for Neuroscience - the world's largest organization of
scientists
and physicians dedicated to understanding the brain, spinal cord and
peripheral
nervous system.
●
CIHR Group in Action
and
Perception - a federally
funded
research group bringing together scientists from four universities in
southern
●
York University Centre for Vision Research - an interdisciplinary group
of
researchers dedicated to understanding the processes behind visual
psychophysics
and neurophysiology.