NCM Elections

I have been an NCM member since my postdoctoral years, and as a PI, I have deepened my engagement, presenting oral and poster contributions alongside my lab members from Japan. My research focuses on the
interplay between motor control/learning and perception, highlighting their reciprocal interactions.

Maintaining diversity—in both research topics and geographical representation—is essential for NCM’s sustainability and growth. In 2023, I organized an international meeting in Japan, including NCM member speakers, to bridge gaps between perceptual and motor control research. As a board member of the Japanese Motor Control Society and a 2024 mid-career awardee of the Japanese Psychological Association, I am well-positioned to promote NCM within the Japanese academic community, encouraging broader participation.

As a board member of NCM, I aim to enhance diversity and inclusion while fostering interdisciplinary and global scientific exchange to support the continued development of the organization.

My name is Konstantina Kilteni, and I am Greek, originally from the island of Rhodes. I studied engineering in Athens, completed my PhD in psychology in Barcelona, and pursued postdoctoral studies in neuroscience in Stockholm. Currently, I lead my own research group in Sweden and the Netherlands, focusing on somatosensory perception during movement and gargalesis (tickle perception). 

I first attended NCM in Dublin in 2017, and since then, I have participated in NCM 2018 in Santa Fe, NCM 2022 in Dublin, and NCM 2024 in Dubrovnik. I was honoured to receive the NCM scholarship in 2020. Additionally, I presented my work at the NCM Award Winners Symposium in 2021, organized an NCM panel in 2022, and participated in another NCM panel in 2024. 

As a Greek female scientist, I am particularly committed to promoting gender balance and diversity within the board and the society. I am also mindful of the challenges parents face when attending conferences. I have been inspired by the (too few) women who brought their children to NCM meetings and believe this highlights the need for greater family support. By promoting family-friendly policies, I believe we can make the NCM community more inclusive and accessible for all. 

I was elected to the NCM board in 2022 and am serving now my last year of a 2022-2025 term. I’ve attended NCM annually since 2015, and if I can say so, it is far away my favorite conference and society. As a member, I’ve contributed posters and given talks at NCM, both as a trainee and then as a PI. On the board, I’ve been involved with a range of activities, from contributing to programming considerations and helping to devise a communication and social media strategy, to acting as the official board member liaison to the DEI committee. If re-elected, I hope to continue contributing as I have, and in addition hope to take on grant writing duties, help broaden the NCM society, and further expand my outreach and DEI role. 

I study the impact of aging on motor control and motor learning in various contexts (motor adaptation, proprioception, biking, etc.) at KU Leuven (Belgium). I have attended the NCM Society meeting almost every year since 2007. I enjoy participating in this meeting because of the variety of topics and models presented there.

I have served two terms as an NCM board member between 2014 and 2020. I am convinced that the richness of science in general, and of the NCM Society in particular, lies in its diversity (professional status, age, gender, country, etc.). As a board member, I will pay particular attention to this issue and will think creatively about it with other members of the board.

In my previous terms as a board member, I also pushed for more communication from the society on social media and developed a preliminary draft of a social media initiative. While the social media landscape has been changing in the last months (thanks, Elon!), I have recently made a proposal to the society to allow NCM members to better share their research with the NCM community. My motivation to become a board member again also lies in the development of this new initiative.

I am an Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh and have been actively involved in the Society for Neural Control of Movement since 2020. I have contributed as a speaker (2020, 2023,2024), organizer, and mentor, with my trainees presenting posters at multiple editions. In 2024, I revived interest in speech motor control by organizing the first session on this topic in 20 years.

As a board member, I aim to promote discussions on emerging topics, such as neural control of speech and neuromodulation for motor control, aligning with my research. I am also committed to advancing diversity, particularly in gender equity. I have supported women in neural engineering by organizing workshops (e.g., IEEE Women in Neuroengineering Summit) and co-authoring publications on barriers faced by women in the field. As a mother of two young children, I’ve attended NCM meetings while breastfeeding and pregnant, which has deepened my commitment to supporting parents in science. Drawing on these experiences, I aim to develop initiatives that empower scientist-parents and foster inclusivity within the society.

As a member since 2001, I have been following the development of NCM from a small, PI-dominated group of scientists to a steadily growing global scientific community with increasing diversity of age, gender, ethnicity and local origin. Scientifically, NCM was always as a healthy mix of psychophysical, neurophysiological and modeling efforts to explain motor function, with recently growing contributions from the fields of rehabilitation and neuroprosthetics. Given my background in primate neurophysiology, working on the neural control of hand grasping, neuroprosthetics, and associated modeling, the NCM community was always at the heart of my scientific home. As a second-term board member, I would like to continue to contribute to the future development of NCM: to further promote cutting-edge science on motor control that is open to new scientific developments and challenges, to keep NCM attractive in particular to young scientists, and to provide interesting and diverse meeting opportunities for scientific exchange and global cultural integration.  

I have attended more than 15 NCM conferences from 1998 onward and have served as member of the board from 2011-2017. I have been active in changing the NCM from a conference targeted at more senior scientists to a meeting with attendance spread across all age-groups. This change was accompanied by a growing role for the poster sessions, a way of presenting science that I love. This change in attendance is reflected in the composition of the board: the more senior scientists slowly get underrepresented. My seniority would thus bring diversity to the board. Diversity at the board is nice, but diversity in attendance and visibility in podium presentations at the meeting is more important. In the last years, I have organised several other conferences where I ensured that specific groups such as woman, junior scientists and non-Americans weren’t underrepresented at the podium. Also in my own lab, I have embraced diversity in terms of gender (20 of the 30 PhD students I have supervised were female) and educational backgrounds (ranging from psychology to physics).

Since my first NCM conference in Florida in 1996, I have been a regular member of the society, as participant, speaker, symposium organizer, and executive member. I have seen the society grow to its current size and international make-up, and I as a scientist I grew with it, always stimulated and enthused by the annual meetings. Understanding how we walk, reach, dance and smile is a hard and multi-facetted problem. I therefore regard it essential to have all model systems represented, including all experimental, methodological, and computational approaches, and foster mutual interaction, collaboration and inspiration. As board member, I would place emphasis that the scientific program will embrace the multitude of disciplinary approaches. Naturally, as a female scientist, I am committed to ensure fair inclusion and involvement of all under-represented minorities. I would be honored to not only benefit, but also to actively contribute to the society. 

I have been an NCM member for over 15 years, and have been honored to serve on the NCM Board for the last 3 years. My work focuses on human motor neuroscience with an emphasis on patient-centered research. During my time on the Board, my aim has been to promote a broad scientific meeting with content spanning multiple motor systems and balanced across basic science, computational, and clinical/translational work. I also am working to increase interactions among NCM community members that extend beyond the annual meeting, by serving on the Social Media Committee and working behind the scenes to develop mid-year virtual events aimed particularly at trainees and early career researchers. I welcome the opportunity to continue advocating for these efforts on behalf of the NCM community through a second term on the Board. I bring diversity to the NCM Board in several ways. Scientifically, my work considers a wide range of questions from sensory and motor control to cognition, and from research in neurotypical individuals to individuals with neurological disorders. Personally, I speak from an intersectional perspective, being both a person of color and a member of the LGBTQ community. Thus, I provide a broad perspective to the NCM Board, with an interest in promoting diversity and inclusion of both scientific thought and membership throughout the NCM community.