Dr. Catherine Thorn

The McDermott Professorships were established in August 2017, funded by an anonymous gift, with the goal of providing early career support and recognition to faculty members who have established extraordinary records of research productivity, teaching excellence and university service, and who show promise of being leaders of the UT Dallas faculty in the future. 

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“The reason that I got into this field was to help people, to discover things that were clinically translatable. It’s exciting to see that I can make a real impact.”

Dr. Catherine Thorn combines a background in engineering with a knowledge of biology to study the basic biological mechanisms of how vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) works to increase plasticity in the motor system. She and her team of researchers in the Motor and Habit Learning Lab in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences at The University of Texas at Dallas aim to understand how individuals learn new motor skills and develop everyday motor habits. 

Thorn’s recent work has focused on the basic biological mechanisms of VNS. By manipulating norepinephrine and dopamine levels, two major neuromodulators previously implicated in synaptic plasticity, Thorn is elucidating how the effects of VNS change. 

In other recent work, she looked at a specific neuromodulatory center in the brain through which VNS could be working. Thorn stimulated the locus coeruleus, in concert with correct motor performance, to determine whether such stimulation would induce plasticity in the same way that VNS does. 

While VNS has been approved for certain conditions by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, not every person responds to it. Thorn said she hoped her work would improve the therapy by increasing the understanding of how norepinephrine plays a role in VNS efficacy. 

Thorn received a Rising STARs (Science and Technology Acquisition and Retention) Program award from the UT System as well as a number of awards from UT Dallas, including a teaching award from the Department of Neuroscience and a Recognition of Outstanding Achievements in Research award from the Office of Research and Innovation. She is a member of numerous professional organizations, including the International Basal Ganglia Society, the Society for Neuroscience and the Dopamine Society. 

Thorn joined UTD in 2018. She previously was a postdoctoral fellow at Brown University and at Pfizer Inc. She earned a PhD in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she also completed a master’s degree in electrical engineering. She earned a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology.