A TMS trial: With Dr. Balasubramaniam and Bodo Winter (PhD student in CIS). pic courtesy: Maryam Tabatabeian.

Welcome to the home page of the Sensorimotor Neuroscience Laboratory 

Principal Investigator: Ramesh Balasubramaniam, PhD

Dr. Ramesh Balasubramaniam is a Professor of Cognitive & Information Sciences at the University of California, Merced.

My research sits at the intersection of motor neuroscience, music cognition, and complex systems — with a particular focus on how the brain encodes and predicts time. Our lab is best known for work on musical beat perception and sensorimotor synchronization: how humans entrain to rhythmic signals, and what cortical and subcortical machinery makes that possible. Using TMS, EEG, fNIRS, and behavioral methods, my lab has mapped the causal roles of regions like the supplementary motor area and posterior parietal cortex in rhythm and timing.

A parallel strand of my research examines noise and variability in motor and postural control — including the surprising finding that auditory white noise stabilizes balance — revealing deep links between the auditory and motor systems. More recently, my work has extended to ensemble coordination dynamics, crowd acoustics, and embodied cognition in mathematics learning. Across all of this, a unifying theme is the multiscale temporal structure of human movement and perception.

We use 3-D motion capture, eye tracking, robotic exoskeletons, TMS, EEG and other electrophysiological recordings to study the brain and behavior. Our research is supported by several grants from the National Science Foundation, Office of the President of the University of California and the Blum Center.
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If you are interested in working in the lab as a post-doc, graduate student or research volunteer please contact Dr. Balasubramaniam (ramesh at ucmerced dot edu)

For the academic year 2022-23, I am at CCRMA, Stanford University.