Dr Jacob Thorstensen

Research interests

Jacob is an early-career teaching and research academic within the Faculty of Health Sciences & Medicine at Bond University and is looking to recruit prospective honours, masters and PhD students interested in studying human neurophysiology.

Jacob’s PhD was in neurophysiology (Griffith University, Australia), where he studied how endogenously released neuromodulators (e.g., monoamines such as serotonin and dopamine) control the excitability of the corticospinal-motoneuronal system and muscle activation in healthy human subjects. Jacob also has postdoctoral training in clinical neuroscience (through The University of Queensland, based at the Queensland Children’s Hospital), where he further developed his expertise in neuromodulation by investigating the use of non-invasive neurostimulation techniques (e.g., repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation, rTMS) as a clinical intervention after nervous system injury. Most recently, before starting at Bond, Jacob was a teaching and research academic in the School of Biomedical Sciences at The University of Queensland.

Overall, Jacob’s research involves electrophysiological data collection from awake human participants, and his work spans across basic and clinical neuroscience, neuropharmacology, and exercise science. He has a strong background in mechanistic human neurophysiology experiments, and extensive experience with non-invasive brain, spinal cord and peripheral nerve stimulation techniques that quantify or modulate the output of the human nervous system and muscles.

Send Jacob an email ([email protected]) if you are interested in research opportunities or would like to find out more about his work.