Dr Nicholas Holmes

Supervisor Details

Contact Details

School of Sport, Exercise and Rehabilitation Sciences, University of Birmingham

Scientific Background

Research Interests

The human hand is an exquisite neurobiological machine with dozens of bones finely controlled by a similar number of muscles. My research uses nerve and brain stimulation methods along with electromyographical, position, and force recordings to piece together how our brains control our hands. We typically focus on very short-latency sensory-motor interactions such as reflexes and other movements that occur within 0.1seconds after a sensory stimulus. To use the great British sprinter Linford Christie's phrase* - I study what happens between the 'B' of the 'Bang!' and when our muscles start to move. (* He said that he starts running on the 'B' of 'Bang!')

Scientific Inspiration

For his attention to detail, Charles Darwin is up there with the best. He didn't publish a flurry of papers every six weeks like other Victorians, but instead quietly gathered his data - on pigeons, worms, peas, fossils, finches and more - until it all made sense. If you've got a Big Idea, gather an overwhelming amount of evidence to support it, then go to press. Respect!

Research Groups

TMSMultiLab

Supervision Style

In three words or phrases: Open science, collaborative, attention to detail.

Provision of Training

With nerve and brain stimulation, and other similar neurophysiological techniques, there is an intense period at the beginning when close, hands-on supervision is needed - it's a physical craft that has to be learned, so some master craftsperson supervision is needed. After a month or two, you'll be running the lab independently and creating your own tools and methods.

Progression Monitoring and Management

We'll have a one-hour weekly catch-up meeting, as well as longer lab-based sessions to review code, data, hardware or materials. It's crucial that you identify your own mistakes (we *all* make them, at all stages) as quickly as possible, and learn to anticipate and work around common errors. As you develop, you will build your inner manager and no longer need a prompt.

Communication

Email is the best default method, with a mutual expectation of replies within 2 working days; I'll be available in-person at least 2 days a week, online for the other 3 days, and via WhatsApp for emergencies (e.g., where do I plug this cable into? / there are no electrodes!). Everyone should take at least 16 hours a day and 6 weeks a year without looking at their devices!

Meetings

PhD Students can expect scheduled meetings with me at least once per week. These meetings will be face-to-face. I have an open door policy, but my pattern of being contactable for an instant response is not predictable.

Work Patterns

Work in my lab requires being present on site (be it in a laboratory or at a field site) during core hours of Monday - Friday 08:30 - 17:30 for experiments with humans (or a subset if working part time).

Notice Period for Feedback

I need at least 1 week's notice to provide feedback on written work of up to 5,000 words.

MIBTP Project Details

Primary supervisor for:

Neural control of task failure: from neuromuscular mechanisms to predictive models

See the PhD Opportunities section to see if this project is currently open for applications via MIBTP.

Please Note: The main page lists projects via BBSRC Research Theme(s) quoted and then relevant Topic(s).

Neural control of task failure: from neuromuscular mechanisms to predictive models

Secondary Supervisor(s): Dr Eduardo Martinez-Valdes

University of Registration: University of Birmingham

BBSRC Research Themes:

Understanding the Rules of Life (Neuroscience and Behaviour)

Project Outline

Muscular fatigue is a critical feature of everyday life. Whether running for a bus or holding heavy shopping, muscle fatigue and perceived physical effort tell us when we can keep going and when we need to stop. Clinically, fatigue and activity-limiting weakness are prominent in conditions such as multiple sclerosis, myasthenia gravis and inflammatory myopathies, and have wide-ranging implications for daily function, economic productivity and healthy ageing.

This project will study the brain and body contributions to muscular fatigue. We will ask how long people can keep performing a movement such as climbing stairs or holding a heavy dinner tray steady, and which brain and body (‘neurophysiological’) responses change as we begin to fail at a particular movement task.

Task failure is the point at which a person can no longer meet a required force, position or movement criterion. This project will:

Characterise fatigue and failure during controlled arm and leg tasks under different force and position demands; assess how objective measures of fatigue relate to task failure and to perceived effort.
Generate a mathematical model of neuromuscular control that predicts proximity and time to task failure under a range of conditions.
Generalise the laboratory and modelling findings to real-world tasks such as climbing stairs and carrying shopping - do the lessons from highly-constrained movements in the lab transfer to everyday life?

We will record high-density and high-resolution signals from muscles of the arm and leg (electromyography, EMG), forces exerted on objects, and body positions. We will also apply pulses of nerve and brain stimulation to probe the neuromuscular system on a millisecond timescale.

These stimulation and recording methods provide a rich, high-resolution dataset (several gigabytes per participant), analysed with tools built or customised in Matlab, Python and R, suitable for modelling and machine-learning analyses.