Bill Nguyen’23 and Nico Petroccione’22Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disorder that causes arduous problems to patients such as but not limited to tremors, muscle stiffness, and impaired balance. Despite there having been treatments from drug therapies with tradeoffs, deep brain stimulation (DBS) is currently favorable in treating PD.

In my paper, I investigate a Parkinson’s biophysical network model targeting the basal ganglia circuit which has been developed in the form of mathematical equations. Moreover, we studied the past computational network model and improvised our own approach in stimulating both the subthalamic nucleus (STN) and external globus pallidus (GPe). Specifically, we successfully broke the Parkinsonian state in our multi-site adaptive constant deep brain stimulation (acDBS) protocol. Although our approach yielded different and complex results, it opened a novel methodology for future treatment of PD.

Bill was advised by Tom Stojsavljevic, Assistant Professor of Math and Computer Science

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Pakula Biomedical Fellowship Information