Run your index finger down the back of your head, explains Dr. Christopher Striemer, and you’ll feel an indentation at the base of your skull called the inion.

About a centimetre below that, extending a few centimetres in either direction, is the cerebellum – an ancient part of the brain that will be part of Dr. Striemer’s focus as a 2021 MacEwan University Board of Governors Research Chair. 

Over the next two years, the associate professor in the Department of Psychology will expand on his work from the past decade that focuses on areas of the brain responsible for attention and motor performance.

“We’ve known for a few hundred years that the cerebellum is involved in motor control and coordination,” says Dr. Striemer. “But for the last 25 years or so, people have started figuring out that patients who have injuries there also have problems with cognitive functions like language, working memory, attention and emotion.”

Dr. Striemer’s recently published research showed that injuries to the cerebellum’s left side could create attention problems. Now, he’s expanding on that work and partnering with Dr. Sean Dukelow at the University of Calgary to study the effects of cerebellar brain injury on motor control. Using a huge database containing information about hundreds of stroke patients, Dr. Striemer and his student researchers, Chella Robles and Ryan Verbitsky, will examine motor control deficits in patients with cerebellar stroke, and the recovery of motor function over time. 

By comparing brain scans of patients who have motor control problems following a cerebellar stroke, with those patients who did not experience motor control deficits, they hope to find evidence of whether the location of the stroke in the cerebellum can be correlated to difficulty with motor control. 

Before March 2020, Dr. Striemer’s research program into the effects of brain injury often involved non-invasive brain stimulation – putting electrodes on a person’s scalp that deliver a mild electrical current. Using that technique, he and his research students could look at how that small burst of electricity might alter performance in people without brain injury.  

But that in-person research approach wasn’t possible during the pandemic, so Dr. Striemer began seeking opportunities to do online research and focused on building partnerships that would yield new research opportunities for his students. 

“Mentoring student researchers and the hands-on teaching that comes with it is one of my favourite parts of my job,” he says. “Opportunities to do that became so limited it was disappointing, but we’ve been able to create new partnerships and build online experiments that are yielding data that is turning out to be similar to our previous in-person experiments.”

These new methods and partnerships, adds Dr. Striemer, will allow him to supervise more students and create more opportunities for the students he works with. 

“I think people sometimes have this view that profs who do research only care about research and not teaching, but that couldn’t be further from the truth in my case, and with so many others at MacEwan,” he says. “It’s amazing to see our students go on to do exceptional things. And it feels good to have played a part in that.”