Scott joined the lab in 2013 as a graduate student in the BME PhD program, after completing an undergraduate program in Chemical Engineering from Lafayette College, where he was a Marquis Scholar. As an undergraduate, Scott won the 2012 Othmer Award from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers.
Scott discovered that during motor learning, the teaching signal that was used by the brain to improve performance was partly generated by existing reflex circuits whose primary function is to respond to unexpected perturbations. To better quantify the mechanisms of motor learning, he implemented a mathematical tool that uncovered hidden states of the adaptation process.
His major discovery was evidence for the idea of a reach integrator. He performed a series of experiments that found evidence for a possibly subcortical system that specializes in control of limb posture. This idea challenged the common notion that the motor cortex generates both the commands that move the arm, as well as the commands that hold it still. Rather, Scott's work suggested that the commands that hold the arm may be generated downstream of the motor cortex, in an unknown region that appears to mathematically integrate the real-time motor commands.
In 2015 he was awarded an NRSA Fellowship from the National Institutes of Health. In 2016 he won the Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award from the Johns Hopkins Biomedical Engineering Department. In 2019 he was awarded the Siebel Prize. In 2020 he was selected for the Mette Strand Award and recognized for his research at the Young Investigator Day at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.
Lectures by Scott:
Publications
Publications
Scott T. Albert and Reza Shadmehr (2016) The neural feedback response to error as a teaching signal for the motor learning system. Journal of Neuroscience 36:4832-4845.
Scott T. Albert and Reza Shadmehr (2018) Estimating properties of the fast and slow adaptive processes during sensorimotor adaptation. Journal of Neurophysiology 119:1367-1393. Model Fitting Tools
Scott T. Albert and Reza Shadmehr (2018) The cerebellum learns to predict the physics of our movements. Think Tank: Forty neuroscientists explore the biological roots of human experience. David J. Linden (editor), Yale University Press.
Scott T. Albert, Alkis Hadjiosif, Jihoon Jang, Andrew Zimnik, Demetris Soteropoulos, Stuart Baker, Mark Churchland, John Krakauer, and Reza Shadmehr (2020) Postural control of arm and fingers through integration of movement commands. eLife 9:e52507
Gonzalo Lerner, Scott Albert, Pedro Caffaro, Jorge Villalta, Florencia Jacobacci, Reza Shadmehr, and Valeria Della-Maggiore (2020) The origins of anterograde interference in visuomotor adaptation.
Cerebral Cortex 30 (7), 4000-4010.
Scott T Albert, Jihoon Jang, Hannah R Sheahan, Lonneke Teunissen, Koenraad Vandevoorde, David J Herzfeld, Reza Shadmehr (2021) An implicit memory of errors limits human sensorimotor adaptation. Nature Human Behaviour 5:920-934.
SP Orozco, ST Albert, R Shadmehr (2021) Adaptive control of movement deceleration during saccades. PLoS Computational Biology 17 (7), e1009176.
Scott T Albert, Jihoon Jang, Shanaathanan Modchalingam, Bernard Marius't Hart, Denise Henriques, Gonzalo Lerner, Valeria Della-Maggiore, Adrian M Haith, John W Krakauer, Reza Shadmehr (2022) Competition between parallel sensorimotor learning systems. eLife 11:e65361.
The role of error-based learning in movement and stillness. Scott Albert (2020) PhD Thesis, Johns Hopkins University.
Scott Albert
Scott Albert