Rate My Professor Sonja Seeger-Armbruster

Dr. Sonja Seeger-Armbruster is a neuroscientist in the School of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Otago, where she currently holds the position of Laboratory Compliance Coordinator (Biological) within the university's Health and Safety operations. Previously, she served as a postdoctoral fellow in the Basal Ganglia Research Group in the Department of Anatomy, under Professor Louise Parr-Brownlie. Her academic career includes earlier work at the Department of Neuropharmacology, Institute of Neurobiology, University of Tübingen, Germany. Seeger-Armbruster's research specializes in neural circuits involved in motor control, reward learning, and movement disorders, particularly using animal models of Parkinson's disease. She employs advanced techniques such as optogenetics and viral vector tracing to investigate basal ganglia-thalamus-cortex interactions and their disruptions in dopamine depletion.

Key contributions include her lead authorship on 'Patterned, but not tonic, optogenetic stimulation in motor thalamus improves skilled motor function in male parkinsonian rats' (Journal of Neuroscience, 2015), which showed that patterned activation of glutamatergic neurons in the motor thalamus restores skilled forelimb reaching in parkinsonian rats. She co-authored 'Viral vector-based tools advance knowledge of basal ganglia–cortex connections in dopamine-depleted rats' (Journal of Neurophysiology, 2016), utilizing transsynaptic tracers to map altered pathways in Parkinson's models. Another significant paper is 'Altered recruitment of motor cortex neuronal activity during the grasping phase of skilled reaching in a chronic rat model of unilateral parkinsonism' (Journal of Neuroscience, 2019), revealing compensatory changes in motor cortex ensemble activity. More recently, 'Paraventricular nucleus of the thalamus neurons that project to the nucleus accumbens show enhanced c-Fos expression during early-stage cue-reward associative learning in rats' (European Journal of Neuroscience, 2024) highlights thalamic involvement in reward processing. Her work received Health Research Council funding as part of innovative University of Otago health projects in 2017 and she was listed as a postdoctoral fellow by Brain Research New Zealand in 2019. These studies have influenced understanding of therapeutic targets for Parkinson's disease and related disorders.