Jocelyne Bloch


Jocelyne Bloch, a Swiss neuroscientist, is a neurosurgeon at Lausanne University Hospital.

Life

She graduated in the Faculty of Medicine of Lausanne University in December 1994 and she obtained her neurosurgical degree in 2002.
Neurosurgeon Jocelyne Bloch is an expert in deep brain stimulation and brain repair for movement disorders. In collaboration with EPFL, she is currently leading a clinical feasibility study that evaluates the therapeutic potential of this spinal cord stimulation technology, without the brain implant, to improve walking in people with partial spinal cord injury affecting the lower limbs.

Paralysed but walking: Brain and spine implants help monkeys move again

The wireless brain and spine implants used could help paralysed people regain control of their bodies. Monkeys with spinal injuries that have left them paralysed are able to walk again through wireless implants in their brains and spines that bypass the damaged tissue. Scientists developed a brain-spinal interface to transmit neural signals from the brain to a site in the spinal cord downstream of the injury. Neurosurgeon Jocelyne Bloch of the Lausanne University Hospital, who surgically implanted the brain and spinal cord implants, says: "The link between the decoding of the brain and the stimulation of the spinal cord – to make this communication exist – is completely new.