Sarah joined the laboratory as an undergraduate student in 2001 while she was completing her BS in Biomedical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University.
As an undergraduate she performed the first motor adaptation experiment on a split-brain patient, demonstrating that inter-manual transfer occurred despite disconnection of the two hemispheres. She joined the BME PhD program in 2005 and discovered a latent form of motor adaptation in patients with severe cerebellar damage. This was a breakthrough because until then, we thought that cerebellar damage made it impossible for the brain to learn motor control. She also discovered that sudden performance errors in a well-learned task did not produce unlearning, but installed a new, fragile memory that with passage of time became strengthened. Sarah was awarded a pre-doctoral fellowship (NRSA) from the National Institutes of Health in 2008, and was named a Siebel Foundation Scholar in Bioengineering in 2009. She completed her PhD in 01/2010.
In addition to her numerous scientific discoveries, as a graduate student Sarah made tremendous contributions to the Baltimore community. She organized the graduate and medical students to mentor the worst-performing high school students in the nearby schools. Her work transformed the lives of many young people, for which she was awarded fellowships from Echoing Green Foundation, Open Society Institute, and the Albert Schweitzer Fellows Program, which support social entrepreneurs with innovative ideas.
Cerebellar contributions to reach adaptation and learning sensory consequences of action. J Izawa, SE Criscimagna-Hemminger, and R Shadmehr (2012) Journal of Neuroscience32:4230-4239.
Protection and expression of human motor memories. SE Pekny, SE Criscimagna-Hemminger, and R Shadmehr (2011) Journal of Neuroscience 31: 13829-13839.
Contributions of the motor cortex to adaptive control of reaching depend on the perturbation schedule. JJ Orban de Xivry, SE Criscimagna-Hemminger, and R Shadmehr (2011) Cerebral Cortex 21:1475-1484.
Size of error affects cerebellar contributions to motor learning. SE Criscimagna-Hemminger, AJ Bastian, and R Shadmehr (2010) Journal of Neurophysiology 103:2275-2284.
Consolidation patterns of human motor memory. SE Criscimagna-Hemminger and R Shadmehr (2008) Journal of Neuroscience 28:9610-9618.
Dissociating timing and coordination as functions of the cerebellum. J Diedrichsen, SE Criscimagna-Hemminger, and R Shadmehr (2007) Journal of Neuroscience, 27:6291-6301.
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.
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.
Linking error, passage of time, the cerebellum and the primary motor cortex to the multiple timescales of motor memory. Sarah Hemminger (2010) PhD Thesis, Johns Hopkins University
Publications
Publications
Sarah Hemminger
Sarah Hemminger
