Heidi Johansen-Berg is Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow at the Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging.
She has made major contributions to understanding brain changes after stroke – providing some of the first evidence for a causal role for the undamaged hemisphere in recovery of motor function, particularly in poorly recovered patients. More recently, her discoveries regarding white matter plasticity have fuelled exciting new fundamental neuroscience, highlighting the importance of a previously overlooked mechanism for brain plasticity.
Methods developed by Professor Johansen-Berg for segmenting brain areas based on their anatomical connections provide a window on detailed anatomical structure in the living human brain not previously visible which now being applied to fulfil unmet clinical needs.