Rate My Professor Michelle Marneweck

Michelle Marneweck is an Assistant Professor in Health Science at the University of Oregon, serving in the Department of Human Physiology and Neuroscience since Fall 2020, where she established and leads the Motor Skill Lab as Principal Investigator. Originally from South Africa, she obtained her B.Arts (Hons.), Master's in Clinical Psychology, and Ph.D. from the University of Western Australia under the supervision of Dr. Geoff Hammond. Following her doctoral studies, Marneweck pursued postdoctoral training at Columbia University with Dr. Andrew Gordon and held an NHMRC Early Career Fellowship working with Drs. Scott Grafton and Gary Egan at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Monash University.

Marneweck's research specializes in sensorimotor neuroscience, focusing on the neural control and biomechanics of complex, goal-directed skilled actions that mimic everyday behaviors, as well as how these processes are disrupted by aging and disease. Her lab employs integrated approaches including behavioral assays, controlled perturbations, biomechanical measurements, and advanced neuroimaging to investigate core themes such as flexibility versus stereotypy in action planning and control, sensorimotor interactions under conditions of sensory uncertainty like visual or haptic feedback, and the impacts of aging or neurological conditions on skilled hand function. Notable publications include "Repetition hampers flexible object manipulation under visual uncertainty" (Sager et al., 2025, European Journal of Neuroscience), "Sensory modality of initiation cues modulates action goal-relevant neural representations" (Kreter et al., 2025, Imaging Neuroscience), "Neural encoding of direction and distance across reference frames in visually guided reaching" (Harris Caceres et al., 2024, eNeuro), "Reorganization of sensorimotor representations of the intact limb after upper but not lower limb traumatic amputation" (Marneweck et al., 2023, NeuroImage: Clinical), "Visual information following object grasp supports digit position variability and swift anticipatory force control" (Bland, Davare, Marneweck, 2023, Journal of Neurophysiology), and "Representational neural mapping of dexterous grasping before lifting in humans" (Marneweck and Grafton, 2020, Journal of Neuroscience). Her work contributes to understanding neural mechanisms of dexterous manipulation with potential applications for clinical interventions.