email: alice.mosberger@nyulangone.org

Alice C Mosberger, PhD

Principal Investigator (she/her/hers)

Alice C Mosberger has a BSc and MSc in Biology from the University of Zürich, and a DrSc in Biology from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zürich, for her work with Martin E Schwab in the field of forelimb motor recovery after spinal cord injury and stroke.

Her early research dissected the capacity of the sensorimotor system to recover motor function using different descending pathways through post-lesion reorganization. Using a rat model, her doctoral research showed that motor corticospinal neurons maintain their movement-related activity after complete axonal transection. She discovered that intense rehabilitative training after such an injury can lead to significant functional recovery of forelimb reaching movements. Through pathway-specific chemogenetic silencing, she showed that the axotomized cortical neurons re-route their motor control via the red nucleus and rubrospinal tract to recover this forelimb function.

For her postdoctoral training, Alice joined the lab of Rui M Costa at the Zuckerman Institute at Columbia University. There she developed a novel mouse behavior task to study how forelimb reaches to spatial targets are learned. She discovered that mice can learn different movement strategies (endpoint vs direction based) depending on their initial movement exploration. Using 2-photon calcium imaging, neural decoding methods, lesions, and pathway-specific manipulations, her research dissociated the roles of cortical and thalamic networks underlying different aspects of these target reaches. During her postdoctoral training, she also contributed to the development of high-resolution (myomatrix) EMG arrays for mouse forelimb spinal motor unit recordings to enhance our understanding of forelimb motor control.

Starting Spring 2025, Alice is an Assistant Professor at the Neuroscience Institute at NYU Langone Health where she and her team investigate how the organizational structure of the sensorimotor system supports biological degeneracy – allowing it to perform movements under different control strategies, through distinct circuits. Her long-term goal is to uncover how this degeneracy provides resilience in the brain that allows functional recovery after central and peripheral nervous system injury and to harness the brain’s potential for reorganization for recovery.

Alice is the recipient of an ETH Research Grant, two Swiss National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, and a K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award from the NIH BRAIN Initiative. During her training, she was a Trainee Associate of the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation to Cure Paralysis, and the Simons-Emory International Consortium on Motor Control.