Netta Gurari

Dr. Netta Gurari received her B.S.E. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania, received her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from The Johns Hopkins University, and completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Robotics, Brain, and Cognitive Sciences Department at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT). She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a National Institutes of Health Career Development Award, National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, and Johns Hopkins University Whiting School of Engineering Dean’s Fellowship.

Dr. Gurari's overarching research goal is to apply her background in robotics to the field of quantitative systems neuroscience to develop a richer understanding of the human sensorimotor system and, in turn, to develop more effective treatments for those with compromised haptic perception and motor control. Her current research goal is to use robotic, neuroimaging, and psychology tools to: i) investigate on which behavioral tasks a proprioceptive impairment occurs in individuals with stroke, ii) determine how the impairment relates to neural structures that are affected post-stroke, and iii) develop a device-mediated training protocol to mitigate the proprioceptive impairment and, potentially, reorganize/rehabilitate the affected neural structures. Dr. Gurari is approaching this work by applying her knowledge in areas including haptics technologies, rehabilitation robotics, and psychophysics testing to conduct relevant research focused in this direction.