Mélanie Boly
mboly@student.ulg.ac.be MD, PhD student, is currently Research Fellow at the Belgian National Funds for Scientific Research (FNRS) (www.fnrs.be) and Neurologist in training at the University Hospital CHU Sart Tilman (www.hospitals.be/chuliege) (Pr Gustave Moonen). Under Steven Laureys’ supervision, she performed several studies comparing auditory and noxious stimuli cerebral processing in minimally conscious and vegetative state patients. In collaboration with the team of Adrian Owen in Cambridge, she also elaborated a method to assess the presence of voluntary brain activity, and thus of consciousness, in non-communicative brain injured patients. This method has already proven to be of potential interest in early detection of sings of awareness in patients previously diagnosed as in vegetative state (Boly et al., Neuroimage 2007 ; Owen et al., Science 2007). Her current research is on the assessment of cerebral responses to pain in individual non-communicative patients, and their relationships with the patients’ behavioural responses as evaluated using standardized clinical scales. Find my articles on PubMed (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov).