Dr
Aoife
Fitzpatrick
Academic biography
Dr. Aoife Fitzpatrick (BSc, MSc, PhD) is an Assistant Professor in the School of Psychology, Dublin City University. Aoife completed her Bachelor of Science in Psychology at Maynooth University. She undertook her postgraduate training at the School of Psychology in Bangor University, North Wales, beginning with a Masters degree in the Foundations of Clinical Neuropsychology. Following this programme, Aoife completed a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience at the Hand and Brain lab under the supervision of Dr. Ken Valyear.
Aoife then moved to Rome, Italy, to take up a postdoctoral research position in the Neuroscience and Behaviour Laboratory led by Prof. Giandomenico Iannetti at the Centre for Life, Nano, and Neuro Sciences at the Italian Institute of Technology (CLN2S@IIT). During her postdoctoral position, she gained a wide range of experience in the fields of sensorimotor neuroscience and motor decision-making, using cross-species electrophysiological and computational modelling methods.
Aoife teaches a number of modules including Biological Psychology and Neuropsychology in the School of Psychology across programmes including the BSc. in Psychology, and two programmes of the DCU Futures initiative - BSc. in Psychology and Mathematics and BSc. in Psychology and Disruptive Technologies.
Research interests
Action selection; Sensorimotor planning; Motor control; Posterior parietal cortex; Hand choice; EEG; fMRI; non-invasive brain stimulation; computational modelling
Aoife is a sensorimotor neuroscientist, particularly interested in the cognitive and neural mechanisms that underpin action selection. Through a combination of experimental and computational approaches, Aoife's research seeks to unravel the complex interactions between sensory information, motor planning, and action selection. Her focus on the neural mechanisms that underpin sensorimotor transformations in action specification and selection aims to contribute to the empirical basis that ensures the healthy lives and well-being for those who are born or have sustained an injury that impairs the use of the hand/arm.