Elif Ahsen Çakmakci

I am a PhD student under the supervision of Philippe Lefèvre. My research investigates how the nervous system predicts and adapts to changes in the physical environment during object manipulation, using collisions as a model to study predictive motor control. One part of my PhD builds on the GRIP space project, using a unique dataset collected from astronauts before, during and after long-term exposure to weightlessness to investigate how motor control adapts when gravity is profoundly altered. Other parts of my research examine how body orientation, somatosensory information and gravity-like force fields influence movement and grip-force control. Together, these studies explore how different sources of information about the environment shape motor predictions and how the brain builds and updates internal models for movement control.