Opher joined the lab in 2000, after completing a PhD in Computational Neuroscience from Hebrew University, and a BS in Mathematics from MIT. He won a Whitaker Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Biomedical Engineering program at Johns Hopkins.
He was central to extending the state-space approach to quantify generalization patterns in motor learning. He demonstrated that adaptation was not a process of disturbance rejection, but a process of optimization.
He generously gave his time to help the research of many students, including Maurice Smith, Sarah Hemminger and EunJung Hwang. He subsequently became Assistant Professor of BME at Ben Gurion University, Israel, and then Professor and Chair of the BME Dept. at Ben Gurion University.
Acquisition of internal models of motor tasks in children with autism. JC Gidley-Larson, AJ Bastian, O Donchin, R Shadmehr, and SH Mostofsky (2008) Brain 131:2894-2903.
Learned dynamics of reaching movements generalize from dominant to non-dominant arm. SE Criscimagna-Hemminger, O Donchin, MS Gazzaniga, and R Shadmehr (2003) Journal of Neurophysiology 89:168-176.
Motor adaptation as a process of reoptimization. J Izawa, T Rane, O Donchin, and R Shadmehr (2008) Journal of Neuroscience 28:2883-2891.
Internal models and contextual cues: encoding serial order and direction of movement. SK Wainscott, O Donchin, and R Shadmehr (2005) Journal of Neurophysiology 93:786-800.
Learning dynamics of reaching. R Shadmehr, O Donchin, EJ Hwang, SE Hemminger, and A Rao (2005) Motor Cortex in Voluntary Movements: A distributed system for distributed functions, A. Riehle and E. Vaadia (eds), CRC Press, pp. 297-328.
Change in desired trajectory caused by training in a novel motor task. O Donchin and R Shadmehr (2004) Proc IEEE EMBS 26:4495-4497.
A Gain-Field Encoding of Limb Position and Velocity in the Internal Model of Arm Dynamics. EJ Hwang, O Donchin, MA Smith, and R Shadmehr (2003) PLoS Biology 1(2):209-220.
Quantifying generalization from trial-by-trial behavior of adaptive systems that learn with basis functions: Theory and experiments in human motor control. O Donchin, JT Francis, and R Shadmehr (2003) Journal of Neuroscience, 23:9032-9045.
Learned dynamics of reaching movements generalize from dominant to non-dominant arm. SE Criscimagna-Hemminger, O Donchin, MS Gazzaniga, and R Shadmehr (2003) Journal of Neurophysiology 89:168-176.
Mechanisms influencing acquisition and recall of motor memories. O Donchin, L Sawaki, G Madupu, LG Cohen, and R Shadmehr (2002) Journal of Neurophysiology 88:2114-2123.
Linking motor learning to function approximation: Learning in an unlearnable force field. O Donchin and R Shadmehr (2002) Adv Neural Inform Proc Systems, Dietterich T. G., Becker S., Ghahramani Z. (eds), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, vol. 14, pp. 197-203.
A real-time state predictor in motor control: study of saccadic eye movements during unseen reaching movements. G Ariff, O Donchin, T Nanayakkara, and R Shadmehr (2002) Journal of Neuroscience 22:7721-7729.
Publications
Publications
Opher Donchin
Opher Donchin