Dr Marco Davare

Biography

Dr Marco Davare is a Senior Lecturer in Physiotherapy at King’s College London. He is a qualified physiotherapist from Université catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain, Belgium), has an MSc in Biomedical Sciences and obtained a PhD in Neurosciences in 2008 (UCLouvain). Dr Davare then joined the UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology, University College London, as a Wellcome funded post-doctoral fellow. In 2012, he was awarded a prestigious BBSRC David Phillips Fellowship and built his first lab combining non-invasive brain stimulation and virtual reality environments for studying cortical mechanisms underpinning the sensorimotor control of skilled hand movements. He then moved to KU Leuven (Belgium) as Associate Professor, funded by an FWO Odysseus programme. In 2019, he co-founded a Digital Health and Smart Technologies research centre, sourcing UKRI World Class Laboratories funds at Brunel University London, where he holds an Honorary Readership.

Dr Davare’s current research interests sit at the interface between movement neurophysiology and cognitive neuroscience. Specifically, he investigates visuo-tactile sensory integration parameters used for skilled movement guidance, which in turn inform perception of the surrounding environment. The general scope of his work is to provide a better understanding of the cortical biomarkers underlying skilled sensorimotor control in health and disease, and to integrate these neurophysiological biomarkers into smart technology-driven rehabilitation of patients suffering from sensorimotor disorders. This line of research was funded by a BBSRC David Phillips fellowship, an FWO Odysseus programme grant, and more recently a responsive-mode BBSRC project grant for a total of £2.5M as principal investigator.