Professor
BME Graduate Faculty Status

Ph.D. in Motor Control/Gerontology, The Pennsylvania State University (2001)
M.S. in Motor Control, The Pennsylvania State University (1999)
B.S. in Kinesiology/Mathematics, Texas A&M University (1997)

Biography:
David Vaillancourt is a Professor in the Department of Applied Physiology and Kinesiology at the University of Florida. Dr. Vaillancourt has appointments in Neurology and Biomedical Engineering at UF. Along with Dr. Stephen Coombes, Dr. Vaillancourt co-founded the Laboratory for Rehabilitation Neuroscience at UF in 2011. His teaching interests are in the area of motor neuroscience, brain physiology, brain imaging, and movement disorders. Prior to joining the University of Florida, he spent ten years at the University of Illinois at Chicago, first as a postdoctoral fellow and then as a tenured faculty member. He completed his masters and PhD degrees at The Pennsylvania State University. Within the Laboratory for Rehabilitation Neuroscience, Dr. Vaillancourt uses behavioral force and kinematic recordings, and multimodal imaging techniques that include fMRI, MRI, fcMRI, DTI, and high density EEG to study the basal ganglia, cerebellum and cortex in motor control of healthy individuals and people with a movement disorder. Dr. Vaillancourt’s laboratory has been continuously funded by NIH since 1999 and he has served on multiple study sections at NIH. He has published his work in journals that include Brain, Neurology, Cerebral Cortex, Neuroimage, Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, Journal of Neurophysiology, and Neurobiology of Aging.

Research Interests:

• Rehabilitative, surgical, and pharmacological interventions for neurological disorders
• Longitudinal changes in brain structure and function in PD
• Functional and structural brain deficits in movement disorders
• Neural mechanisms for how visual input affects motor performance
• Neural basis for how the human brain regulates parameters of grip force