Elisa’s PhD thesis focused on the TMS-related neurophysiological characteristics of the motor cortex and on developing new TMS methods to study motor function (Assessment of motor cortical excitation-inhibition balance and microstructure - studies combining navigated transcranial magnetic stimulation and magnetic resonance imaging, University of Eastern Finland, 2016). For example, Elisa and her co-authors developed a method to measure the cortical inhibitory state that significantly reduced the commonly observed wide variability in the responses allowing more reliable measurements (Clinical Neurophysiology, 2014). She and her co-authors also found a novel cortical inhibitory motor response, the late-silent period (Journal of Clinical Neurophysiology, 2015). Furthermore, she and her co-authors showed that while TMS is mainly a functional neuromodulation tool, it can also detect structural characteristics from the motor cortex, and they developed a method to do this (Journal of Neuroscience Methods, 2015; Neuroreport, 2015).
In addition, during her PhD, Elisa was also involved in developing methods that improved the accuracy of TMS motor mapping (e.g. The Open Neurology Journal, 2015; Brain Topography, 2017), gain understanding on how brain reacts to repeated TMS pulses (Neuroscience, 2015; PLoS One, 2017), how the primary motor cortex neurophysiology changes with maturation (Human Brain Mapping, 2017) and how epilepsy (Journal of Neurophysiology, 2018), binge drinking (Addiction Biology, 2018) and chronic stroke (Clinical Neurophysiology, 2016) change motor physiology.
During her postdoctoral studies, Elisa has been involved in understanding the therapeutic effects of non-invasive neuromodulation in patients with depression, chronic pain and schizophrenia. In addition, she and her co-authors have gained valuable knowledge on how the neurophysiology of frontal brain areas changes with maturation (Human Brain Mapping, 2019) and how the peripheral motor system interplays with repeated motor cortex TMS pulses (Journal of Clinical Neurophysiology, 2019).
