PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR
University of Wisconsin-Madison
BIO
Dr. Melanie Boly is a neurologist and neuroscientist with a joint appointment in Neurology and Psychiatry at UW-Madison. For nearly twenty years she has been studying altered states of consciousness such as vegetative state, sleep, anesthesia and seizures, working under the mentorship of Profs. Steven Laureys, Pierre Maquet, Adrian Owen, Marcello Massimini, Karl Friston, Giulio Tononi, Hal Blumenfeld and Catherine Schevon. Her research, which combines neuroimaging techniques (e.g., PET, functional MRI, TMS-EEG, high-density EEG and intracranial recordings) with the theoretical framework of the Integrated Information Theory, aims to uncover the neural mechanisms of the level and contents of consciousness in healthy subjects and neurological patients.
Dr. Boly’s work has led to numerous publications in international peer-reviewed journals (~170 Pubmed-indexed articles, current Google Scholar H-index 86), as well as invited talks at international conferences. She is board certified in neurology in both Europe and the US and is currently performing 75% FTE research and 25% clinical work as an epileptologist.
Research Interests: consciousness, epilepsy, sleep, coma, disorders of consciousness, integrated information theory.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
Tononi G, Boly M, Grasso M, Hendren J, Juel BE, Mayner WGP, Marshall W, Koch C (2022) IIT, half masked and half disfigured. Behav Brain Sci., 45: e60. doi: 10.1017/S0140525X21001990. PMID: 35319429
Koch, C., Massimini, M., Boly, M., & Tononi, G. (2016). Neural correlates of consciousness: progress and problems. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 17(5), 307-321.
Boly, M., Massimini, M., Tsuchiya, N., Postle, B. R., Koch, C., & Tononi, G. (2017). Are the neural correlates of consciousness in the front or in the back of the cerebral cortex? Clinical and neuroimaging evidence. Journal of Neuroscience, 37(40), 9603-9613.
Siclari, F., Baird, B., Perogamvros, L., Bernardi, G., LaRocque, J. J., Riedner, B., Boly, M., Postle, B.R. and Tononi, G. (2017). The neural correlates of dreaming. Nature neuroscience, 20(6), 872.