One out of three people will suffer from a brain disorder during their life. Now is the perfect time to excel in understanding the complexity of the brain and use the information to treat brain disorders.

Debby Klooster graduated from BioMedical Engineering at the Eindhoven University of Technology (MSc, TU/e) in 2012. Afterwards, she enrolled in the post-master program Qualified Medical Engineering (PDEng, Kempenhaeghe, TU/e). She was introduced to brain stimulation during a three-month visit to the Berenson-Allen Center for Noninvasive Brain Stimulation (BA CNBS, Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA). There, Debby found her drive to focus on brain stimulation since she genuinely believes that many patients, with various brain disorders, could benefit from it.

The question that intrigues Debby most is why some patients benefit from brain stimulation whereas others do not, even when exactly the same stimulation protocols are applied. This variety is caused by inter-individual differences in brain characteristics. During her PhD (TU/e-UGent Belgium), she focused on electr(omagnet)ic brain stimulation techniques and learned to use multimodal neuroimaging techniques to map individual brain characteristics and derive personalized stimulation protocols. 

In 2020, Debby started working as a postdoctoral researcher within the PerStim program (collaboration between TU/e, UGent, Kempenhaeghe and Philips) further advancing methods of personalization for brain stimulation.

From 2021-2023, Debby worked as junior postdoc at UGent (personal grant from Flanders Research Organization). Together with the electromagnetics group at TU/e, she is combining computational modeling of stimulation-induced electric fields with advanced neuroimaging techniques. By combining computational modeling and image- and signal-processing, she studies both the direct effects of stimulation, as well as the distributed effects throughout brain networks. She became an official collaborator of the BA CNBS in 2022.

Currently, Debby is working as postdoctoral researcher within the ElectroMagnetics for Care and Cure lab at TU/e, still in collaboration with UGent and also with the BA CNBS.